Build → meditating every day
A five-dollar forfeit per missed day creates the present-moment cost that meditation itself does not yet provide. Pin a quiet meditation spot — a balcony, a park bench, a yoga studio — and Lockin verifies you got there before your daily deadline.
Suggested starting contract
$5/day against missing your daily target of GPS check-in at meditation spot by daily deadline.
Install Lockin on iOS or Android and create your account. The onboarding flow takes under three minutes.
From the challenge picker, select Location — the GPS check-in challenge type. Lockin verifies you reached a real-world spot before the deadline; there is no in-app self-report version of this contract.
Pick a fixed, dedicated spot you will use every day for your sit. A balcony, a porch, a corner of the backyard, a park bench, a meditation or yoga studio entrance, the steps of a quiet building nearby. Avoid pinning a spot inside the room you sleep, work, or eat in — the contract works because going there pulls you out of the contexts that absorb your attention.
Every Location contract has a per-day deadline by which the GPS check-in must complete. The default is 23:59 in your local timezone — end of day, useful if you simply want to guarantee a sit happens before midnight. Tap Set deadline in the wizard and use the 24h picker to lock in an earlier time — 7:30am for a morning sit, 9:00pm for an evening one. Tighter deadlines unlock higher Locks and XP rewards. The deadline is set once at contract creation and applies to every scheduled day; a consistent daily deadline matters more than the specific time.
Choose a registered charity from Lockin's vetted list — categories include mental health, climate, animal welfare, and digital literacy. Forfeited stakes go there. Lockin charges a small platform fee to cover payment processing and operations.
The default is five dollars per day. Set it high enough that missing a day would sting, but not so high it creates anxiety that undermines the practice itself.
Confirm your commitment and fund your stake wallet. The contract starts at midnight in your local timezone. Each day, walk to your meditation spot and open Lockin to confirm the GPS check-in before your deadline.
From Lockin's data
In Lockin beta location-challenge contracts framed around a daily ritual, users who selected an outdoor spot away from the rooms they sleep, work, and eat in showed stronger week-three retention than those who chose an indoor spot inside their main living area. The walk to the spot doubles as the cue that triggers the practice — consistent with research on context-dependent habit formation.
"I had three different meditation apps on my phone and used none of them consistently. The stake made the difference. The GPS check-in at the bench in the small park near my building is what got me to actually go and sit. Five dollars is small, but the geofence is what changed the behavior."
— Anonymous beta user, meditation location challenge, 6 weeks active
The Lockin contract verifies that you arrived at your meditation spot before the daily deadline. It does not measure session length — Lockin does not currently have a sensor-based way to verify what you do once you sit down. Once you are at the spot, set whatever timer you prefer for the actual sit. Research on MBSR — including the Holzel and Lazar 2011 study published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging — used an average of 27 minutes per day over eight weeks. A five- to ten-minute daily sit is the typical starting floor for a sustainable practice. Shorter sessions build the habit; longer sessions build the skill.
Lockin's challenge types use real, hands-off device sensors — GPS for location, the pedometer for steps, your phone's own daily app-usage counter for app time, the camera with on-device AI for workout pose detection. Sitting still and paying attention does not produce a sensor signature any of those can read, and Lockin does not use honor-system check-ins or photo proof. The location challenge is the closest fit: it guarantees you got to the spot, which is the part of the daily meditation contract that fails most often. Once you are at the spot, the practice itself is between you and the cushion.
Forfeited stakes go to a registered charity from Lockin's vetted list. You choose the charity from categories including climate, mental health, animal welfare, and digital literacy when you set up the contract. Lockin charges a small platform fee to cover payment processing and operations. Refer to the transparency page inside the app for charity-by-charity tallies.
If you do not check in at the spot before the daily deadline, your stake forfeits for that day. Lockin contracts have no skip days, sick days, or excused-absence mechanism — the consequences only stay credible if they are unconditional. The way to absorb genuine disruptions is to choose a spot you can reach on hard days as well as easy ones, and to set a deadline that does not depend on a fragile schedule. A morning meditation tied to your commute breaks on every snow day; a spot inside your home, with a flexible deadline, holds through weather and travel. Pick honestly at signup, rather than hoping the contract will bend later.
Every Location contract has a per-day deadline by which the GPS check-in must complete. The default is 23:59 in your local timezone — end of day. During contract setup you can tap Set deadline and pick any earlier time using a 24h picker, for example 7:30am for a morning sit or 9:00pm for an evening one. The deadline is set once at contract creation and applies to every scheduled day; you do not change it day-to-day. An earlier deadline raises the difficulty and the reward — tighter deadlines unlock higher Locks and XP rewards. Consistent with the rest of Lockin's contract terms, the deadline is fixed for the active contract — it cannot be edited mid-contract.
Free to download. You set the target, the stake, and the charity.