As I’m reviewing the last year and planning for 2017, I’ve already created 3 new goals and will be adding one more in a few mins. I’ve killed one goal though. How about you? 
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I have actually taken the opposite approach and have deleted almost a 1/3 of my goals. I see the New Year’s as a great time for pruning and prioritization.
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I have a series of new goals around RescueTime, which I just started using
in order to help get a handle on my Twitter habit.
Normally, when something like Twitter gets a little out of hand for me, I
would just eliminate it completely–but I’ve gotten my last 2 jobs and
quite a lot of side gig $$$ through Twitter!
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I follow the ‘Everything Green’ approach, where I’m only allowed to add a goal if every single goal is green. Then I’m allowed to add a single goal. Then I have to wait until everything’s green again (and ideally another week to pass) before adding new goals.
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Indeed, I’ve had “goal fatigue” in the past
This time two of the new goals are about reducing distractions, so I hope there won’t be such an effect
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I’m resolving to do three things this year.
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Stop beeminding weekly miles run and start beeminding “times exercised” or some other, softer metric. This is part of a broader transition from focusing on running to focusing on overall fitness. Specifically, I’ve started lifting weights and plan to continue this as a major part of my fitness regimen. Naturally, this decreases the number of times per week I go running, and it makes less sense to beemind total miles when I’m no longer actively training for an ultramarathon.
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Start bringing my lunch to work more regularly. Last year I broke a bad starbucks habit, and this year I want to break the other bad habit I have of going out to lunch near my work. It’s so easy to think “Oh, this is only $5,” but that adds up to more than I’d like to spend every month. With any luck, this will also encourage me to cook more at home so that I have leftovers for easy lunches.
Both of these goals relate to my broader goal of getting healthier and losing a few pounds. To do that, I’m doing the following.
- I’ve stopped beeminding my weight. Or rather, i’ve stopped letting my weight goal be binding. Instead, I’ve changed my weight loss goal to a tracking goal: steady road, with a nice wide lane so that I don’t have to worry about derailment no matter what my weight does. I’m also beginning to mind “stepping on the scale” so that I still track my weight and have access to beeminder’s nice moving average and rose-colored dots, but don’t have to worry about gaining muscle and derailing.
The nice thing is that I have my “step on the scale” goal keyed to add a datapoint whenever I update my weight, so this doesn’t represent an increase in work at all. More automation is always better, though I can’t quite make myself spend the $120 on a wifi connected scale to fully automate my weight tracking.
These should all be low-effort, easy to track, and nudge me toward good habits. Here’s to a healthier 2017!
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Depending on the app (?) that you might use to keep track of workouts, you can probably automate adding data points (1 for each workout session). For sure it could be done with RunKeeper and Zapier.
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And you can chain these together (e.g. using IFTTT) just as you’ve chained your weight and weighing-in goals. With a custom aggregation of nonzero, you can copy your (lenient) runkeeper and workout datapoints into the generic workout-more goal and it’ll only give you one point per day.
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Can I use multiple IFTTT applets to send data to one goal? I’ve just set up a strava applet which adds (1) to my workout goal whenever I log a run, and a location applet for one of the many branches of my gym which adds (1) to the same goal.
@philip good call on the nonzero aggday method.
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That should work perfectly. Of course, without changing the aggregation, that could give you two points on the same day.
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Yes you can have multiple IFTTT recipes pointing to the same beeminder goal. I do that for my Facebook goal
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Aggregation can be important for location-based triggers too, because sometimes they occur multiple times in a single visit.
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Right, that’s why I mentioned you. I’ve set the aggday to nonzero so I don’t double count if, say, I log a treadmill workout at the gym, or the location trigger fires a lot due to bad data.
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Update on this particular goal: I’ve found it easier to make a trigger fire if my phone connects to my gym’s wi-fi, which has the same SSID across locations and is much more reliable than location data.
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