I’ve been beeminding my violin practice. I don’t know if my experience can be valuable to you
Inspired by the guest post by Jake that @dreev just mentioned, I’ve been beeminding my violin practice for more than 10 months now, but I’m not as serious as either of you are. It seems like I’m just rounding 100 hours these days. (I had already tracked ~7 hours much earlier, before getting serious) People say that I improved considerably since i began using Beeminder for violin practice. I believe most of them, but I don’t really notice it myself, since it happens gradually.
As you can see from the graph I slowly increased the steepness of the road during the summer until I reached the 0.4 hours (24 minutes) a day that I’m currently at. I think that I started with 5 minutes a day, which was probably near or above my average for the previous year, but it was easy to keep up at that rate. Watching the cumulative total slowly increase gave me confidence and still does today.
I think that the slow initial rate helped me with getting used to the planning that is required to avoid derailing. As you can see from all the orange dots on my graph, I spend most days “in panic”, and honestly I often don’t start playing until the deadline is less than 30 minutes away. (I even had to reply to a legitimacy check a while ago, because I forgot to hit the submit button in the 30 second window between the time when I had played enough for the day and the deadline - most days I remember) Spending all this time “in panic” means that I have learned to be careful and look ahead: for example I know I’m not going to get home tomorrow until after the deadline, so I know that I have to get to the upper lane of the road today to avoid derailing tomorrow.
My current pledge cap is $30. It is high enough that I always prefer to practice for 24 minutes instead of derailing. Actually one of the best things about Beeminder is that it allows me to be a dick and prioritize my practice. Earlier one of my most common excuses to myself for not playing was that it might disturb someone. With $30 on the line that is a much smaller concern, especially since I’ve never seen evidence that I was bothering anyone. A few times I have also gone to considerable lengths to avoid derailing, for example by having someone bring my violin, when I couldn’t expect to get home before the deadline, so I could practice anyways.
On the other hand losing $30 when I derail is not the end of the world to me. It’s happened twice on that goal in the past year, and considering that the violin lessons (which are far more expensive than a derailment) are now much more valuable, I don’t mind it that much. I expect to derail every once in a while.
In the case of your violin practice, the best advice I can give is to repeat the old advice everybody around here keeps repeating: Consider setting the road to be a little less steep in the beginning, so you are sure that you can easily reach your goal every day. Then start slowly increasing the steepness when you get used to taking Beeminder into account when you make your plans. Remember you can use the retroratchet function, to keep the goal a little dangerous, when you practice more than your goal dictates.
On the other hand I know from experience that I almost never do more than Beeminder dictates, because Beeminder works like an anchor for me. So if you’re like me, reducing the steepness like this will probably result in a period where you practice less than you otherwise would, until you start increasing the road beyond what you’re used to now.