Obligatio

Today I'm happy to announce obligat.io, a platform for making public commitments to your goals. It doesn't do a lot yet, but I'm pretty pleased with it so far.

The idea is that the wording encourages you to be very concrete about what you're going to do and when so that it's verifiable. It's meant to be fairly soft touch other than that – just giving you the tools to make commitments, not forcing you into any particular system. The idea is that it will piggyback off your existing networks rather than try to be its own one.

I'm pleased that I ended up designing it without a login system. I realised that I don't really need one if I build everything around email. Instead of logging in, the site will email you a link to follow up with when the deadline for your commitment has passed, though that part isn't actually working yet. Mostly I just want to be really careful to do email in a way that doesn't get me instantly blacklisted from the entire internet.

Still, my main goal was to get it to the point where I could start using it, and that's already happening. Mission accomplished!