Long distance relationships and beeminder

Life
1

I’m from Germany and have girlfriend from Finland who also happens to live there. We met when we were both on an exchange semester in Denmark. The cool thing is that this relationship stuck, even after our time together in Aarhus. Long distance relationships have their own set of challenges. One of them is that there are relatively long breaks in the rhythm of my life due to visiting my girlfriend or her visiting me. This happens every 8 weeks or so and lasts for about 10 to 14 days. I love my girlfriend a lot and I love that we’re able to see each other as often as we do, but it seriously undermines developing a reliable frame of habits to built up and ingrain themselves into my life.

I was just wondering if anyone has had similar problems in the past or right now and how they frame that in a way that makes it less “distracting” (for a lack of a better word). It’s like I’m living two lives one with and one without my girlfriend and both are very different scenarios, from a standpoint of the resources (time, attention, energy, motivation) I can put towards work and metawork (which is what I call thinking and implementing changes to my work and life routines). I would like to live one life, but don’t know how to refactor my approach that makes that (more) possible.

P.S.: I apologize for my poor English. Every time I read over my old posts I’m almost embarrassed by my writing. Not enough to stop posting here, though, so there is that. :slight_smile:

5 Likes
2

First, I am a native English speaker and this post seems perfectly fine, so
good work! :slight_smile:

Second, I personally think it’s ok to have different sorts of personal
habits. I can see it being tricky to use Beeminder to enforce those
habits, but a few tips include:

  • Having scheduled breaks or reduced rates when you want to spend less time
    on your goals. This works really well when you know more than a week ahead
    of time.

  • Having a lower rate that corresponds to your desired goal rate when busy,
    and using Max Safe Days to make sure you don’t build up too much buffer
    when you are less busy.

  • Scheduling reviews of your Beeminder goals corresponding to when you
    change from busy/less busy.

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3

My girlfriend has just moved back to the US with me after spending a year in London. While she was there, generally I would set up take-a-breaks for most (but not all) goals when I was visiting her or she was visiting me (I went to London 9 times in the last year). I also had a goal to send her postcards (total: 88).

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4

There’s no better sign of progress…

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