StickKing to your goals

24 February 2010

I recently learned about stickK.com. (In fact, I learned about it on the CBS Sunday Morning episode I blogged about on Monday.)

StickK helps you achieve your goals by having you put your money where your mouth is. They have you state your goal, back it up with a dollar figure you’ll pay every time you miss your goal, then select a charity to send the penalty money to. Here’s the genius part: you have the option of picking what they call an “anti-charity” to receive your money. This would be an organization that you really don’t to support. A staunch liberal, for example, might select the George W. Bush Presidential Library. That provides extra incentive to stick to your goal.

The website takes a credit card number from you and every interval that you either don’t meet your goal or don’t report in they send the agreed-upon sum to the charity or anti-charity.

I signed up on Monday. I decided to commit to exercising four times a week for 12 weeks. I’ve been doing this pretty faithfully this year (my form of exercise is Wii Fit Plus), but I was slacking off on days I worked late. I figured stickK would help me exercise at least four times a week.

I pledged $5 a week for 12 weeks and selected an anti-charity that the money would go to.

StickK allows you to involve a referee who verifies you stuck to your commitment, or be on your honor. (I went with the honor system.) It also allows you to add friends to support you, who will be notified about your progress. Pretty cool.

It’s only been a couple of days, but I’ll admit that the anti-charity concept has been pretty powerful. There’s no way that charity is going to get my money. So I had no hesitation about exercising Monday and Tuesday.

Generally speaking, I prefer rewards over penalties. But this idea is intriguing to me, and so far it’s effective.

Tagged with: exercise, goals, stickk.com