Beeminder (http://www.beeminder.com is a "self-tracking system that uses monetary incentives to help you stick to your goals".

The service looks like an interesting complement to Skritter. I admit that I haven't used it a lot yet but it looks promising.

I see two options:
(1.) Skritter copies and adapts some of the functionality.
(2.) Since both services have APIs, integration would certainly be easy.

In comparison with the better-known service StickK (http://www.stickk.com), founded by several economists out of academia and recommended by Dan Ariely, Beeminder is specifically made for quantifiable goals.

"Beeminder is the only self-tracking system that uses monetary incentives to help you stick to your goals. If you just want self-tracking you have a lot of choices and if you just want commitment devices you have more and more options as well. Beeminder combines self-tracking and commitment contracts: keep all your data points on a Yellow Brick Road to your goal or we take your money. The combination is powerful. We call it flexible self-control."

I love Beeminder. I actually built a maximally primitive hookup between Skritter and Beeminder which I still use to automatically send Skritter progress stats over there:

https://www.beeminder.com/nick/goals/skritter

I hooked it up for a couple other interested users from this forum, but for some reason it didn't work for them, and I haven't found the time to tweak it to get it going again. I wanted to spend more time on it, but I didn't see all that much interest last time I posted it, even though Beeminder is pretty much the best thing ever for getting yourself to study.

@nick

Hey guys, so just checked out and have signed up to Beeminder, seems pretty cool.
So my question is:

I want to start by finishing HSK levels 1 & 2.
So should I put 300 words as a goal (I have 111 learned so far) or should I do individual characters?
The thing is; how many actual characters are in levels one and two? Of course I could manually count them (remembering to not duplicate words that are in other words i.e wo3, wo3 men5 etc)
It would be nice to have how many characters individually are in each list.
Could that be done, or has it been already.
For example in the My Words list it's just pages and pages of words but doesn't say how many characters.

Cheers...

@nick, I remember you bringing up Beeminder awhile ago. I didn't try it, but seems you've really stuck with it. Now I'm thinking about giving it a try... so many small things I want to keep up with!

timoak33, I haven't counted exactly for the Skritter lists, but it should be pretty close to the official character requirements listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_Shuiping_Kaoshi#Writing_tests

That is, 300 words, but using 349 characters. You could use either as your Beeminder goal.

josh, I've used Beeminder to do a ton of things and have written a book about it. I can't recommend it enough.

Genius. If anyone wants to send me money on paypal when they don't make their goals, I'm more than willing to help out.

"josh, I've used Beeminder to do a ton of things and have written a book about it. I can't recommend it enough. "

The book or Beeminder? :)

Beeminder. I don't know whether to recommend the book yet.

@nick: Has the book been published?

Not yet. It's in my editor's hands right now. I will probably just throw it up on Kindle instead of trying to get a traditional publisher to do it, because that would take a while and I'm not sure of the audience. The book will be called "The Motivation Hacker".