I haven't seen anyone else mention these services and how to use them, so I thought I would write up a quick recommendation/review post of a couple prominent ones. Please add any more recommendations in the comments, I know there are many such services out there that have their own focuses.
Why track behavior?There are about a million studies out there that confirm the same thing: if you are trying to change your own behavior, keeping track each day is an essential tool for monitoring your progress and motivating continual improvement. This applies to anything from reducing unwanted behavior such as negative self-talk, stress-eating, or stress-spending, as well as re-enforcing desired behavior such as daily exercise, regular chore performance, or fix-it-yourself tasks. This forum already provides a great opportunity through the journal posts for people to track their behavior and progress towards their financial goals. These programs offer some more functionality.
If you have a financial goal, tracking your behavior and progress are going to be really helpful in successfully completing it.
Recommendation: HabitRPGI started using HabitRPG about 6 months ago, so I have a pretty good understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. I love it.
The basic format is this: behaviors/tasks fall into 3 categories.
Habits,
Dailies, and
To-Dos.
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To-Dos are one-time tasks, such as fixing an appliance, paying a bill, or preparing for a move, that do not occur on a regular basis.
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Dailies are tasks or behaviors that repeat on a fixed schedule, between 1 time per week to 7 times per week. For example, brushing your teeth might be a task you would set to occur every day of the week, while going to the gym could be set to repeat on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
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Habits are behaviors that occur regularly but without a fixed schedule, or less frequently than once per week. For example, organizing the garage might need to happen every couple months.
Tasks can also be broken down into smaller steps with lists. For example, I am selling some things online. "Sell Table" can have a checklist with the steps such as "Take Nice Photos", "Create Craigslist Post", "Arrange Time to View", and finally, "Sell!".
The hook for HabitRPG is that the "theme" is like playing a game. You play as a little 8-bit character. Each time you successfully complete a task, you receive a reward in the form of game-money, experience, and possibly, little virtual pets. If you fail to complete a task by its due-date (the end of the day for a daily, or the end of an optional due-date on a to-do), you will lose a little health. Money can be spent on in-game rewards like costumes, or customizable real-life rewards like watching a favorite tv-show or going out to dinner at a favorite restaurant.
Strengths of HabitRPG:
- Free to play (optional tip jar or subscription)
- Daily tracking of behaviors such as spending, eating, exercise, language/music/art/gardening practice
- Can keep track of streaks of good behavior with dailies, such as 5 days bringing lunch into work in a row
- Designing dailies and to-dos encourages breaking down big tasks into smaller, more manageable chunks
- Form a team of friends or join a guild (I am thinking of making an MMM guild) to tackle challenges and discuss tips
- Low risk of 'punishment', focus is on rewarding good behavior
Weak Points of HabitRPG- Website and app are still being developed and improved
- Better for tracking day-to-day behavior than progress towards long-term goals
- Some people may not find the gamey-ness as motivating
Recommendation: BeeminderI have NOT used Beeminder, so keep that in mind. I researched it before I started using HabitRPG, deciding that was a better fit for me. I may use Beeminder in the future though, because they've got different strengths.
Beeminder is for setting longer-term goals and updating progress along that road. For example, paying off 10,000 of debt by Dec 31st, 2014. You set the starting condition, and then each day must update the progress manually or connect another app/device to log it automatically. You can set multiple different goals with different end-dates. When you set a goal, you also create a contract between yourself and the Beeminder company, basically a bet that you will succeed. If you fail, you have to pay up your bet.
Beeminder provides excellent
progress graphs. At the beginning of your journey, it will create a 'path' from your current situation to the end goal. This path with have swaths on either side. This is called the 'yellow brick road'. As you update your progress, the graph will add data points. For example, July 22, 2014, 9,000 left to pay off. July 23, 2014, 8,060 left to pay off. If these data points are within the swath of 'acceptable progress', you can watch as your progress data points match up with the path set at the beginning of the goal.
The hook with Beeminder is that
there is a failure condition that can cost money - if you fail to update for too long, or you update but your progress falls off the yellow brick road (out of the zone of acceptable progress), then you pay the app developers a small to large amount of money. REAL MONEY.
Strengths of Beeminder- Can be free to use
- Set long-term goals and have a progress plan made-up/graphed out for you
- Focus is on steady progress towards goal, with a little wiggle room from one day to the next
- Integration with many other devices/services for automatic updates
- Higher risk of real world 'punishment' if you do not make progress on your goals (motivating for some people)
Weak Points of Beeminder- Less focus on the day-to-days and to-dos
- Less focus on rewarding positive behavior, esp. doing one-off tasks or those occasional things that don't track as well
- Less gamey (for those of us for whom its fun!)
So I hope some folks here will find this useful. There are bazillions of these sorts of programs out there will different focuses and strengths and weakness. I have also tried:
-Remember the Milk (good for keeping track of weirdly repeating things, like once every 3 weeks, or a to-do that is 8 months in the future)
-MyFitnessPal (good for meal tracking, also exercise and weight tracking)
-Fitocracy (I tried it but didn't find it particularly motivating)
Here is a list of a number of other services:
http://blog.beeminder.com/trackhack/I haven't tried most of these, but if you have, please leave your feedback for other forum users.
