March 2010
1 post
CENSORED
We had to do some censoring today. The first thought was to delete this seemingly prank pledge but hey there are all kinds of people and aspirations out there. This could be someone who wants to be a good husband someday and forces himself to practice with ladies of the night. We wish him nothing but the best of luck.
Before
After
January 2010
2 posts
Reblogged from 6senses: The Importance of Public...
Leo Babauta is an author, creator of Zen Habits and probably one of the better known bloggers on motivation, inspiration, getting stuff done and other postmodern topics alike. On his 6changes blog he recently wrote about the importance of making your pledges public. He’s left out Pledgehammer as one of the ways to make resolutions public but hey, no-one’s perfect.
Two steps in the 6...
December 2009
2 posts
Study: making a New Year's resolution improves...
There is a great article in Wall Street Journal on New Year’s resolutions. According to a study, led by Dr. Norcross from University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, the majority of New Year’s resolutions do fail but this overshadows an important truth: the simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of...
Quiz that helps you understand how good is your...
I first came across Richard Wiseman in Life On Board project (part 2 here) where he discusses the matters of luck and destiny with Cris Gardener. One point these gentlemen make and that I’ve often thought about later is that ‘luck’ is something you can create yourself. Or rather that luck is something that you don’t wait for passively but rather it comes to those that...
October 2009
1 post
How to grow your business
We received this email the other day:
Dear CEO, We are the department of registration service in China.We formally received an application on Oct 9, 2009, One company which self-styled “Tromite Corporation” are applying to register ” pledgehammer ” as internet brand and Domain names as below :
pledgehammer.asia
pledgehammer.cc
pledgehammer.com.tw
...
June 2009
1 post
Health and well-being related resolutions most...
It’s almost mid-year, a good time to look back at our New Year’s resolutions and goals of all sorts. (Or make them if you haven’t written your aims down yet.)
At Pledgehammer we looked back at all the pledges made so far. By far the largest category of resolutions, at four in ten, are related to health and well-being. 12% of people resolved to exercise more, 10% pledged to give...
May 2009
1 post
Study: men give to charity to impress the opposite...
According to the academics at the University of Kent altruism is not the only reason why people, especially men, donate to charity. Rather it’s done to impress the opposite sex. Because of that the academics recommend charities to include ‘mating goals’, such as the face of an attractive woman or man, in fundraising campaigns to increase donations. Read the full story.
...
April 2009
2 posts
The good news: people make resolutions throughout...
One of the questions we had when we launched Pledgehammer was: do people actually make resolutions at times other than the New Year’s Day. The good news is they do, number of pledges has grown steadily. They just don’t do it as much as they do on January 1st. However there are small spikes around Chinese New Year, beginning of Lent and April 1st. (The latter rather related to the fact...
“One of the topics that I have been passionate about for sometime is the need to...”
– Wealth Habit blog (Yes, it’s Pledgehammer they’re talking about)
March 2009
3 posts
Two great reviews of Pledgehammer
Pledgehammer was reviewed by Inventor Spot and Too Lazy To Do It. The former is a website about the latest inventions, innovations and interesting ideas from Obama twittering to a electrical talking bananas. And Too Lazy To Do It is not a procrastination site, but a project aimed at letting business ideas circulate, grow, and become a reality. They write:
Pledgehammer seems to be entirely founded...
Interviewed by Happiness Is Better
Happiness Is Better is a blog about personal finance, real estate investing, early retirement, and being happy. In these economically turbulent times it’s a good source for ideas, commentary and useful links. Dustin recently sent me a few questions about Pledgehammer and published the interview on the blog.
Birthday resolutions - a great idea
I stumbled upon this ‘birthday resolution” idea by Elise Blaha, or rather a to do list for the year.
Not only is it a great idea but its execution is even better. The substance is having a to do list for a year with length equal to the corresponding age. (And it scales well. It’s shouldn’t be very hard to tick a hundred boxes in the year before your 101st birthday....
February 2009
8 posts
Resolutions tips from Dr. Josh
I stumbled upon this blog post by Joshua C. Klapow, Associate Professor at the University of Alabama and author of Living Smart. It’s about New Year’s resolutions but I’m sure readers of blog agree you can make resolutions every day, not just on January first, slightly dizzy from the night before. With his kind permission here’s his post re-published.
A few more ways to...
“There is a web site in this great expanse called the internet that is designed...”
– Dale E. Stuemke on Launch Your Goals blog. See his book, too.
A picture is a thousand words
Now you can save your thousand words and add a picture to your profile. This here is mine, for example.
We also fixed several niceness issues and annoyances with this morning’s release. So Pledgehammer should be smoother to use than ever before. Enjoy!
Stairway to resolutions
If Pledgehammer had an office we’d probably have a similar stairway.
Spotted on Sunset.
Tip: re-do your New Year's resolution
Inspired by this article by wellness writer Marissa Kristal here’s our tip of the day. If you’ve broken your New Year’s resolutions already why don’t you do it again. Do it again, and this time for 30 days only. (I’ll soon blog more about why the 30-day period.)
Happy New Year!
“Ever since Peter Gabriel’s breakthrough (groan) solo smash (double groan) hit,...”
– The funniest quote about Pledgehammer on Mason Zimbler blog
Chris Edwards helps to achieve your goals,...
Personal coach Chris Edwards gives great advice on setting and achieving goals. He suggests the good old ‘eating the elephant one bit at a time’ approach in setting goals. His goal to run 1609 km a year, which translates into 31 km per week is a good example of that.
Chris also recommends announcing your resolution to as many people as possible.
Other options you may chose...
January 2009
7 posts
“The whole idea of a resolution is to make yourself better off than you were the...”
– A great column in The Monitor by Andy Comer
An important change in terms and policies
We’ve had some inappropriate pledges lately which forced us to update our ever so strict terms and policies. Our legal bit now has this addition:
Inappropriate pledges will be removed, unless they’re really funny.
More pledges, more coverage
We just passed our 250 pledges mark and we’re right on track to become the next small thing.
It’s great to see Pledgehammer written about and hear positive feedback. Cheryl from vital design emailed me the funniest quote about Pledgehammer: nick the greek meets buddha. I couldn’t come up with a better tagline myself.
Darius Graham, author of Being the Difference, interviewed me...
Welcome, Cancer Research UK
Today was Blue Monday, supposedly the most depressing day of the year. Psychologists say it’s down to six factors, one of which is broken New Year’s resolutions.
If you felt the blueness of this Monday because of a broken resolution, and you care about cancer, the following is hopefully good news. You can now choose Cancer Research UK as your beneficiary when you’re making a...
Pledgehammer spotted by cool spotters
For someone like that’s been a regular reader of Springwise for years it was awesome to see Pledgehammer covered there.
Tallinn-based Pledgehammer gives people a way to make their resolutions public, whether it’s stopping smoking, losing 20 lbs. or—to take an example from the more than 100 on the site—taking better care of one’s tractor. When they make their pledge, users are...
Hello 2009!
Happy New Year!
Last few days have been great. We’ve been written about on USNews, Profy, TheNakedRelationships and TheLifeExperimenter, we’ve had tweets and there are now more than a hundred pledges on Pledgehammer. If that’s not a great start of the year, I don’t know what is.
Also, we’ve fixed cheering on the site so now you can post updates on your progress or...
December 2008
7 posts
Jessica Knows Pledgehammer
Check out the 15-day resolutions series by Jessica Smith. If you’re looking to change one or many aspects of your life she’ll give you great advice on diverse subjects from reading more to having a cleaner house. Today’s post is about pursuing and learning new things. And Jessica starts the blog post as follows:
Before I get in to today’s New Years Resolution, I wanted to give...
Advice: don't make old resolutions for the New...
I stumbled upon a great article about making resolutions by columnist and author Jan Denise. She very kindly gave us permission to publish it on this blog. So here you go. And check back here in the future for more advice on making and keeping resolutions.
Don’t make old resolutions for the New Year
We might feel obligated to make New Year’s resolutions … but they’re...
Thank you for making pledges!
It gives everyone at the ivory tower of Pledgehammer headquarters great joy to see that there are more and more pledges made every day. We’re still far from the milestone of, say, ten thousand pledges but you have to start somewhere, right?
If you’re out of ideas what to resolve try out Resolution Randomizer. For yours truly it recommended to resolve to never to be seen arm wrestling...
Mark Twain on New Year's resolutions
Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter...
"In 2009, I will finally get around to voting for...
It’s that time of year again… And here are two great New Year’s resolutions to get you in the mood: Somegreybloke and The Simpsons.
Pledgehammer -1 : IE - 0
Today we fixed a few nasty bugs that stopped people with Internet Explorer 6 or older seeing the front page correctly, editing their profile or viewing cheers to pledges.
No wasting words here. Keep calm and carry on.
We are live!
We’ve fixed many nasty bugs our beta testers had pointed us to. And at wee hours today we made the courageous decision to go live. So here we are now, live, and it feels awesome. We know there are a few bugs still lurking around in the system. If you come across anything that shouldn’t be there please drop us a line.
November 2008
1 post
Great new features
After some tweaking, building and tinkering we’re proud to present some nice new features that are yours to use from this week. You can now post updates of your progress and cheer other people that have made a pledge. You can edit your profile so people know it’s you not a random line of letters and numbers making pledges. And you can also change your mind if you so wish. Edit the...
October 2008
2 posts
New charity - ChildLine
Starting from today you can choose to donate to ChildLine if for some reason your pledge is not successful. ChildLine is a confidential helpline for children at risk of abuse who have no one to turn to. I think the Hide this page button on their page illustrates the need for such service well.
£20 could pay for an NSPCC ChildLine worker to answer calls for another hour, so more desperate children...
Hi, we're still Pledgehammer
Long time, no see! Sorry for the silence, we’ve been busy with our day jobs and families, so you haven’t seen Pledgehammer developing all that fast.
The good news we’re back in business and almost done with the next release that includes many vital features. So start thinking about those pledges already, soon you’ll have a great site to make them on.
March 2008
1 post
Hi, we are Pledgehammer
Pledgehammer is a site that helps you keep your promises. You make a pledge, we make it public and sharable, let you pick a financial incentive and send you an email upon the deadline you have chosen. If for some reason you didn’t keep your pledge we ask you to pay up. And money will go to a charity you pick yourself. Either way the world will be a little bit better. We are currently in...