Ugh, yeah, we're getting crushed by the new year's resolutions rush (good problem to have). But, well, it's mostly own idiocy, of course. We're actually Rails and Mongo, not AppEngine. (If you're curious about anything else in our stack, weusethat.com/beeminder.)

Thanks so much for the nudge on this! We're digging into Mongo performance tuning now...

Holy cow, thanks so much for the awesome Beeminder plug! You said it better than we do. :)

Can we steal your "Engineer yourself" as a tagline?

We did try to address these common objections. See Section 3.2 of the paper: http://centmail.net/centmail.pdf

If you're having trouble getting yourself to take self-imposed deadlines seriously, try this:
Write down an easy deadline on a twenty dollar bill and commit to tearing it up (!) unless you meet it.
Keep the $20 in front of you as motivation till you finish and then put it back in your wallet.

Pick things that nothing but procrastination could prevent you from completing on time, and have an exemption for unforeseen emergencies.