since we're talking about adhd and habits on cohost dot org, i'd like to plug beeminder, a goal-tracking application that i've been using for... a couple years now. it hasn't fixed everything, but it's the only goal-tracker i've stuck with for this long, and one of the few that's actually caused a persistent long-term change in my behavior: walking 5k+ steps a day
about beeminder
the big gimmick of beeminder is this: you set up your goal (brush your teeth every day, walk 8000 steps a day, whatever), and if you fail, they charge you money, then reset your goal with a configurable number of days of leeway. this doesn't go to charity, it doesn't go to your subscription (if you have one). they keep it. full stop. the amount also optionally increases every time you derail, up until a cap that you choose.
as an example, here's my graph for my 'steps per day' habit. the red line represents my commitment; you can see that in late november it jumps up, because i intentionally got rid of the slack. you can also see the steepness increasing over time as i went from 5k to 6k to 7k, and that i've gone from constantly derailing near the start (yellow dots and the downward-pointing arrows) to consistently having multiple days of slack (blue/green dots).
"but couldn't you just lie?". yeah, you can. but that defeats the point. and i've found, experimentally, that lying once makes it way easier to lie in the future, so if you think you're going to fall into that pattern, i would suggest not using it. the exceptions are things that pull data from third-party sources; you cannot manually edit those, and if it's something like a step counter then faking data is hard. i don't think it's a coincidence that daily walking is the "stickiest" habit i've developed from this, since it's also the only one i cannot lie on.
the flip side is that if you don't lie, the monetary charge can act as a way to trigger the feeling of 'okay, i fucked up, but i did suffer a consequence, so it's time to get back to work'. easier to forgive myself that way, imo. this isn't necessarily how they think about it, but it helps for me.
usage suggestions
start slow. don't add habits too fast; i would suggest no more than two habits that you're trying to form at once. and if you're not sure how much you can commit to, make your goal extremely easy: read one page of a book a week, walk 100 steps a day, whatever. you intentionally can't make changes instantly.
some other notable things that i like:
- almost every change you make to a goal (increase amount, decrease amount, change penalty) takes at least a week to take effect. this is an intentional limitation, because the theory goes that you're more likely to make commitments that correspond to your 'ideal' that way. sort of like a new year's resolution.
- every time you derail, they send you an e-mail, and you can reply with extenuating circumstances. i've found them to be pretty reasonable, including giving pushback on situations i hadn't thought of ahead of time (once i said i couldn't go for a walk because it was too cold and i was working late; the support person replied "that's not in the details of your goal, but we'll cancel the charge; just don't do this too often"
- you can get API access using oauth or just by grabbing a bearer token from your profile page. the API is rich enough that you can implement basically anything you want; there are even some features that they charge you for that you could implement yourself, because they cater to total fucking nerds
- i got a support e-mail from someone with they/them pronouns in their sig once :)
- the name is just very cute :3
anyway i hope this helps someone!
i got a support e-mail from someone with they/them pronouns in their sig once :)
aww~