Hi DhO,

I've been working on a website that helps people commit to and maintain a regular meditation practice. It's called Medivate (from "meditate" and "motivate").

We're ready to launch a trial version of the site. Please take a look! I'm hoping it can help you maintain a regular practice--at any rate, I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback on it.

The site's at medivate.org.

Best wishes!

Fred Meyer
Cofounder, Medivate

Hey,

Perhaps the front page could have a little something about how the site works and what it is.

Interesting idea.

Daniel

This may be useful.

That's a brilliant link fivebells!

I remember filling in Fred's questionnaire some time back when he was asking if we thought it was a good idea or not. I said in the comments that he didn't need to improve his idea, he just need a NEW idea period.

Im afraid this is a non starter.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the feedback and the link to the design document. If you have any other thoughts, I'd appreciate hearing them.

Fred

Who's using it? What do they like about it? What's better about it than keeping a log in a spreadsheet? What's your goal in developing this?

If I were developing this, I would take it along to a sangha and pay a few people $5 to use it for five minutes and tell you what they think about it. Preferably grumpy tech-savvy people who will tell you why it sucks and/or why they wouldn't use it.

I must admit, it doesn't obviously solve a problem I have.

During the manic phase of the A&P I did think quite a bit of creating some kind of meditation log application for smartphone. I was more interested in logging key data that could be used to identify stages. If we had enough people logging it could be used to do research to understand the stages and maybe in the future be able to do some kind of diagnosis.

Ironically, when I go back in the dark nights I found the stages obvious enough to find my idea irrelevant. It's when the stages aren't obvious that a diagnosis would be useful but it's also at that time that the data wouldn't be able to provide one.

If it was to be combined with a social network, it might have some value. There is some weightloss website out there that use this formula. Still, there is a spiritual materialism stink to all this.

I don't get it, the link just took me to a log in page. I don't want to log in, I just want to see what it is.

I like this website, and think it could be fun if there was a meditation version:
http://www.fitocracy.com

Hello,

I have found the website chains.cc extremely helpful for keeping me motivated to sit for X amount of time each day. I also have an ongoing tally counter I use to track my "edge" in terms of length of meditation session and length of time I can sit in strong determination. For example, right now my strong determination "edge" is 23 minutes. Whenever I sit "strong determination" for 23 minutes I click my tally counter. When I've pulled it off 25 times I increase my "edge" by 3 minutes.

I do this for total session length as well. I started off only being able to sit for 3 minutes by myself, and only 30 seconds in strong determination, before it was unbearable. Using this sorts of tricks I worked up to sitting for an hour twice a day. Best of all using these tricks made it fun.

Anything that makes practice more like a game I think is positive.

Best, Luke

Hi guys,

I just checked back in on this, and I really appreciate the thoughts. I'll try to use these as I continue to work on the site.