Pay for results, not failures - by Lydia Nottingham

One of them sends $30 to BeeMinder whenever he’s not home by 00:30. One is paying another $50 each day he hasn’t done the items on his To Do list. I can’t imagine living like this—the guilt, the ‘ugh field’, the panic it’d create! I can’t be throwing money into thin air (what would my grandparents think?). What I am willing to do, however, is pay for a service. And the service of ensuring I’m on track to sleep at some target time—tracking me down, convincing my brain whatever it’s working on can wait for tomorrow, closing my laptop, pointedly pointing towards the stairwell—is one I’m perfectly willing to pay for, if it works. In response to my midnight bounty, one housemate sent me a message— for which I paid 10% of the bounty— and also reminded me to sleep IRL when I came in and had been chatting too long—for which I paid another 10% of the bounty. Why make your friends’ incentives aligned with your failure? Of course you want to align your friends’ incentives with your success! A few

One of them sends $30 to BeeMinder whenever he’s not home by 00:30. One is paying another $50 each day he hasn’t done the items on his To Do list. I can’t imagine living like this—the guilt, the ‘ugh field’, the panic it’d create! I can’t be throwing money into thin air (what would my grandparents think?). What I am willing to do, however, is pay for a service. And the service of ensuring I’m on track to sleep at some target time—tracking me down, convincing my brain whatever it’s working on can wait for tomorrow, closing my laptop, pointedly pointing towards the stairwell—is one I’m perfectly