BetterMe Uses Public Humiliation to Motivate You
You’ve seen apps that use loud sounds to wake you in the morning and you’ve seen apps that use games to try and get you up. BetterMe uses a different approach – it uses public humiliation.
It is way too easy to hit the snooze button half asleep, silence the alarm, and go back to sleep. Developers have thought of different means of ensuring you don’t do this. iSleepin for example does not let you snooze the alarm unless you play a game first – the reasoning is that by playing the game you cognitive cogs are set in motion and thus you will wake up.
Abraham Agopian, the developer behind the BetterMe app for iOS, thought of a different way of ensuring you get up instead of hitting the snooze button: public humiliation. The reasoning here is that the threat of public embarrassment will give you the jolt you need to get up in the morning.
The app works much like any other alarm app out there- you can easily set up as many alarms as you want, choose the alarm ringtone, choose the schedule for the alarms, and so on. The key difference is that the BetterMe app connects to your Facebook account (you have to grant it access, of course). When the alarm goes of, you have two choices.
As mentioned above, BetterMe uses public humiliation as a motivator. When you hit the snooze button it will post an embarrassing message on your Facebook account, something like “I am weak willed. I set an alarm for [7AM] but instead I have decided to snooze”.
If BetterMe sounds like an interesting app and you think it will help you stop snoozing your alarms, you can grab it for free from the App Store here.
It is way too easy to hit the snooze button half asleep, silence the alarm, and go back to sleep. Developers have thought of different means of ensuring you don’t do this. iSleepin for example does not let you snooze the alarm unless you play a game first – the reasoning is that by playing the game you cognitive cogs are set in motion and thus you will wake up.
Abraham Agopian, the developer behind the BetterMe app for iOS, thought of a different way of ensuring you get up instead of hitting the snooze button: public humiliation. The reasoning here is that the threat of public embarrassment will give you the jolt you need to get up in the morning.
The app works much like any other alarm app out there- you can easily set up as many alarms as you want, choose the alarm ringtone, choose the schedule for the alarms, and so on. The key difference is that the BetterMe app connects to your Facebook account (you have to grant it access, of course). When the alarm goes of, you have two choices.
- Choice 1 – wake up and go about your day.
- Choice 2 – hit the snooze button and suffer the consequences.
As mentioned above, BetterMe uses public humiliation as a motivator. When you hit the snooze button it will post an embarrassing message on your Facebook account, something like “I am weak willed. I set an alarm for [7AM] but instead I have decided to snooze”.
If BetterMe sounds like an interesting app and you think it will help you stop snoozing your alarms, you can grab it for free from the App Store here.
