Commit Club — Rating, Pros, and Cons

Reviewed January 2021.

As the present moves towards the future of education and future of work, new tools and platforms are emerging to help people keep up.

Commit Club, designed to help practice accountability for everything, is one of these platforms.

Commit Club describes itself, “as a straightforward commitment device. Commit to a challenge with ETH. Get your ETH back as you complete your challenge. Fail and forfeit your ETH to everybody successful.”

The question is — does it work? If you want to develop a new habit, or stay accountable to a task, will Commit Club help you?

Additionally, is it safe? Commit Club uses the cryptocurrency, ETH, and it’s important to know your money will be stored and returned properly.

In this review of Commit Club, we answer all that as well as list out the pros and cons of using the platform. Read on for more.

Sections

1. How Commit Club fits into the education stack
2. Using Commit Club for work tasks
3. Other types of challenges
4. Is Commit Club safe?
5. Does Commit Club work?
6. Does Commit Club actually help you stick to your goals?
7. Pros
8. Cons
9. Conclusion and rating

How Commit Club fits into the education stack

Commit Club was made so that people stay accountable to their challenges and habits.

In education, it is important to develop positive habits.

You don’t learn a language in a day. Similarly, expertise in a subject is built over years of deliberate practice, not months.

In the Commit Club challenge creation screen you are met with a few options:

While the possibilities are limitless for what to commit to, we will be looking at just Practice and Productivity in this review.

Clicking on any of those options results in a preloaded challenge coming up, though you can change the challenge name or write in a new one all together.

Given the nature of learning, we feel Commit Club is ideal for committing to challenges around education.

Some easy challenge ideas for education:

• Daily language practice.
• Daily math practice.
• Complete 1 worksheet in the subject of your choice a day.
• Daily timed practice — 15-minutes.
• Daily quiet studying.
• The list goes on…

The way Commit Club fits into the education stack, therefore, is this:

1. Create a challenge around the subject you are studying.
2. Share your public challenge link in a study group or simply use committing money on yourself to drive performance.
3. Practice and report results and improvement in the public journal.

Touching upon the above, Commit Club is especially great for groups of learners who can share their challenge pages with each other — and we hope to see the platform implement more group oriented features in the future. In a decentralized, remote environment, Commit Club can also be beneficial.

Using Commit Club for work tasks

Commit Club additionally markets itself as being great for work tasks, but how does this claim stack up?

We have found that for tasks which require daily work, Commit Club is great. You commit to your work challenge and show your challenge page to colleagues for extra accountability.

Many difficult or large projects can be completed and made less intimidating when broken down into small chunks done daily.

If you commit to working on that novel for 1 hour a day for example, it will be less intimidating than trying to do 3 ten hour sessions in a month.

However, there are limitations. As of now, Commit Club does not have a goal-based mode. The team has promised this functionality, but Commit Club will be more ideal for work when this is ready.

With this functionality, you could commit to getting a work challenge done by a specific date, and then share this stake with your colleagues. You could promise to deliver a certain Asana card by a certain date, for example, and share this with your team. If you fail, you lose money, in addition to your word being less trustworthy.

Other types of challenges

While we are specifically looking at Commit Club within the education and work space, we believe Commit Club is also great for challenges across a wide array of topics:

• Meditation and mindfulness training
• Fitness
• Dieting
• Quitting bad habits
• Sports
• Speedrunning
• Waking up early
• Healthy lifestyle
• Social challenges

Is Commit Club safe?

Commit Club is completely safe.

Your ETH is secured properly with typical quantum-proof cryptography, and your challenge remains private as long as you want it to. If you want to share your challenge, it’s up to you to share the challenge page.

When you want your ETH back, you go to the Withdraw page, and withdraw it back to your Web3 wallet.

Does Commit Club work?

As of now, January 2021, Commit Club is best for challenges that require daily dedication, as opposed to single session challenges and commitments.

What this means is that if you are developing a habit, Commit Club will help you tremendously.

If you are working on learning something or practicing something, Commit Club will also help you tremendously.

Additionally, if you small chunk a big work task, Commit Club will be great.

However, if you are committing to losing weight every week, you will still have to wait for weekly check in functionality.

Likewise, if you are committing to a one-time goal, you will need to wait for one-time check in functionality. Alternatively you can check in every day as a reminder to do your one-time goal.

Does Commit Club actually help you stick to your goals?

Commit Club helps you stick to your goals by staking money on them.

You are further incentivized by getting money from lost challenges — challenges by other people that were failed. You get this money every time you check in. If you miss a check in, you lose the remainder of your stake and this goes to the other successful people.

By being able to share your public challenge pages along with a journal of your challenge, you can also have friends keep you accountable.

Yes, Commit Club will actually help you stick to your goals. This is unless you are comfortable lying to yourself or your friends.

Soon, Commit Club will be putting in functionality to have external applications verify that you actually did what you said you would do. Additionally, these applications will automatically check in for you.

Pros of Commit Club

Here are the advantages of using Commit Club:

• Motivates you to develop positive habits, quit bad habits, and accomplish difficult tasks that can be small chunked.
• You can make ETH from challenges that other people fail.
• There are various types of challenges. Commit Club can quickly fit into any stack.
• You only have to pay a gas fee when you deposit and withdraw. ETH is in the system to save on Ethereum gas fees.
• It’s easy to keep a running journal of your challenges.
• Challenges can be shared with friends and like minded communities.

Cons of Commit Club

Here are the disadvantages of using Commit Club:

• Commit Club uses the honor system. It is not great for people who are comfortable lying to themselves and their friends.
• Layer 2 functionality with something like Polygon or Solana will make Commit Club more decentralized.
• Lack of official group functionality requires having your own communities, such as a Telegram, Discord, or Meetup group.

Conclusion and Rating

We reviewed Commit Club personally, as well as with remote-first entrepreneurs and teachers we collaborate with, and saw direct results.

From our findings, Commit Club will actually help you develop positive habits and stick to your goals.

Rating: 4.3 / 5 stars

Commit Club is a thoughtful platform with many uses and we recommend it. We would be comfortable giving Commit Club a 5/5 review when one-time check in challenges, group functionality, and layer two functionality is in.

We’re also looking forward to the potential of Commit Club becoming a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).

Commit Club can be tried here.

That’s our review of Commit Club! What do you think? Have you had similar experiences or dissimilar ones? Join the conversation with us on Twitter, or comment here with your feedback!