PS Welcome to Wesabe!

So much so that myself and two friends created http://www.pledgehammer.com on our free time. It provides an easy way to write your resolutions down and share with whoever you want to share them with. It also adds a financial incentive – if you don’t keep your resolution it asks you to donate money to charity. Only charity, there are no options to give money to a friend or ‘enemy’. So whether you keep your resolution or not, either way the world will be a little bit better.

Pledgehammer is definitely not a hardcore goal-reaching tool such as Stickk or myGoals. It’s rather a very easy and sharable way to write down your goals, with a charitable touch. Having your goals written down, with a deadline and publicly seen for all your friends is just incredibly powerful.

We’ve gotten off to a good start http://www.pledgehammer.com/pledges/ Would be great to get more people to try it our and get some feedback.

Stick to your own performance, IMO. If you set a goal like “lose one pound a week” or “get promoted by the end of the year”, you’re really gambling. Measure instead the things you can control: “consume an average of 1800 calories a day or less each week”, “exercise half an hour a day”, “get a new certification by the end of the year”, “increase my workplace productivity by 10%”–you know if you can really do all those things, and you’re the one who controls the result. You can’t control if your boss promotes you in the end, but you can do everything you can to deserve a promotion. You can’t control the exact timetable and quantity of fat loss, but you can adopt healthy behaviors. If you’re going to be putting cash on the line, it’s an important distinction. And especially important when evidently the site will not allow you to do a weight goal anything but weekly, thus preventing long-term averaging.

But I can see the benefit of the service in general, I just think that particular aspect is problematic.

I also have a feeling (but haven’t tried the site, so I can’t say for sure), that it’s going to be a lot like a message board post that asks a question like “how long does it take you to get to work in the morning?”

It’s a really easy question to answer, and people like to feel like they’re contributing, so everyone posts, “it takes me 25 minutes to get drive to work” (or whatever), and soon enough, there are 450 responses. But, when person number 451 comes and finds the thread, he doesn’t read through the existing responses and see if he has anything interesting to add, because it’s not a discussion. He just adds, “it takes me 10 minutes”, to the bottom, and doesn’t look at all the previous posts, because they’re not really very interesting on their own.

This site sounds basically the same. It’s a big long list of goals, each of which is very interesting to the person who posted it, but not particularly interesting to anyone else. Be honest, when you go to the site and it says “5243 people have posted goals!” Are you going to read them? Maybe the ones on the first page. Then you’ll see that a whole lot of people want to lose weight, or get out of debt, and you’ll get bored, and you’ll add your own goal to the end of the list, where no one will read it. I’ve seen it happen a million times on other sites, and I’ve even contributed to it plenty of times.

The fact that no one reads about your goal is exceptionally important on this site, because you’re relying on the community to chastise you if you fail. But, if you haven’t actually talked to anyone on the site about the goal, and you don’t feel like you’ll be letting down your friends, then you’re not getting much extra motivation to stick to your plans. If you ultimately do fail, and no one says, “Hey man, you let us all down!” all it does is reinforces the notion that no one on the website actually cared if you succeeded at all.

Yeah, it’s a fairly negative view, but I’ve participated in enough online communities to know that most people only want to read something that you’ve written if they think it might be funny or interesting, they think it will help them solve a problem they’re having, or it gives them a chance to feel helpful by giving you information that they have and you need. “I want to lose weight” doesn’t fit into any of these categories, so I really don’t see many people wanting to read about it.

(Full disclosure – Stikk was founded by a friend of a friend of mine)

Behavioral finance studies have shown that people are much more averse to loss than they are attracted to gains. Meaning, most people will react far differently (more conservatively) in a situation in which they are gambling with money they already have compared to a situation in which they are given new money with which to gamble and then get to keep whatever they don’t lose. So by paying the money upfront to StickK, you may start thinking of the money as already gone, which will give you less of an incentive to get it back.

I also have twin fitness and financial goals of riding my bike to get in shape and, ultimately, sell our second car (I work < 5 miles from home so it’s imminently rideable).

Anyhow, in order to create a positive feedback loop my allowance is now a “per mile” allowance based on what trips I replace driving my chevy blazer with riding my bike. The per mile value is about the 1/2 the real cost (gas, insurance, taxes, maintenance, etc) of owning my blazer.

It works pretty well.

I do like the concept of Stickk though. It lets you put your money where your mouth is. Blotmarks is simpler, but if you have self discipline, it can be just as effective.