Resolutions for 2015

Life
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@mary started a post about how Beeminder’s helped in 2014. It gave me the idea to start a parallel post about 2015, where we can post about plans and goals for the coming year.

First, to start us off with some brainstorming, here are a couple sweet blog posts on topic. From @grayson, Beeminding My Way Through 2015 is complete with beeminder goals in the sidebar of their blog for added social accountability.

Second, I’m loving this post from @dollarflipper… they’re Beeminding new listings for their side business of reselling things on e-bay.

Finally, this detailed post from @anomalily, Sticking to Resolutions is a bit about 2014, and a bit about 2015.

Ok, so what are my plans for 2015?

##Sleep
First, I’ve noticed a strong correlation between my sleep habits and my mood, so I’ve got a two-goal solution there. I’m beeminding total time slept using the Sleep as Android integration, and I’m also beeminding bedtime to keep my sleep schedule fairly regular. Staying up late and then napping in the middle of the day is not a good lifestyle choice for me.

My bedtime goal is manually tracked. I get 2 points for getting in bed before 23:50, and 1 for getting in bed before 00:00.

##Money
Second, I’m using Rescuetime to track how much time I spend on budgeting and money-related tasks. I’m not sure yet if this is the right metric, so this goal may evolve over the course of the year, but I’m hoping that by the end of 2015 I’ll know how much money I have, what I can afford to spend it on, and my bills will get paid on time!

##Leisure
Finally, I tend toward the work-a-holic lifestyle, and so I like beeminding my leisure as well as my work. I find it helpful to have a reminder / excuse to stop and smell the roses. So I’m going to dial up my reading goal for the this year. That goal is in terms of Kindle locations, so that’s pretty much exactly one book over the course of 2014. (Ok, ok, I did read a few Jane Austen novels in between, but didn’t count them). I’m going to give myself the super ambitious goal of doubling that rate, and we’ll see if I can’t read two whole books in 2015.

Ok. That’s me. What about you?

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See also @philip’s Resolutions For Real from last year!

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I feel like my current grid of nine goals is pretty much exactly where I want it to be. It feels nice and stable. So my 2015 goals are just continuations of my 2014 goals. Sleeping more, eating less junk food, biking more, losing a bit of weight, answering all my emails in a timely fashion, compiling business contacts, practicing recorder on a regular basis, and getting back to maintaining both my business blog and my open source blog after an embarrassingly lengthy unplanned hiatus. Slow and steady is the only way to go.

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I’m having a tough time focusing on the important stuff at work. Getting down in the weeds too much. I’m going to beemind 750 words in the morning first thing to clear out my mind from all the stuff going on at home and also think about. We’re in really good shape money-wise (YNAB believers, especially for couples with shared finances). I have goals but we’re working towards them pretty routinely.

Biggest room for improvement area is fitness. I’m going to be playing volleyball again regularly, but I’d love to hit up the gym on the weekends. If I’m active 3 times per week, I’d be thrilled.

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‘Active’ is an excellent framing for that goal! You can support it with a more lenient gym goal if needed, but I’m a big fan of Beeminder goals that closely reflect reality. e.g. you can go for a run, swim or hike when on holiday and fulfil this one.

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Well, it’s already December, and so I thought I dig this old post back up and see what the outcome looked like.

Sleep

I quit my bedtime goal at some point, though I then restarted it. It helps a little, but not a lot, and in addition to forgetting to enter data unless it’s an eep day, it also generated a totally new bad habit of getting into bed and then playing on my phone for a half hour before actually trying to go to sleep. At first this was just setting up alarms, then it was playing a few rounds of a game, and spiraled from there. I think that this goal would benefit from automatic tracking, so perhaps the thing to do is set up a Tasker task to add data automatically after my screen goes off or something.

I’ve continued to use Sleep as Android, though the biggest benefit is the scheduled alarms that I have to get out of bed to turn off. However, even respecting that has slipped of late. Unless I have planned the night before what exactly I’m going to do when I get up in the morning, I will often crawl back into bed and wait for a secondary alarm to wake me and then rush through the morning.

I’ve been curious all along about how valuable/accurate Sleep As Android’s sleep quality metrics could be, and so I actually just bought a Jawbone Up to compare. Still collecting data on this.

Money

I still just did not want to do this, and kept dialing it down until it’s now at the point where I stay on track by logging into my banking website once a week. #fail

Reading

Smashing success. I’ve read Grandpa Andrew’s memoir, Touching a Nerve by Patricia Churchland, and I’m 35% of the way through Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which, while writing this, I’ve just decided to dial up so that I can finish the book by the end of the year, making it a round 3 books finished in 2015. (I’ve also read several pulp fiction books and 3/5ths of the Game of Thrones series this year, but I didn’t measure those. I guess this is a non-fiction reading goal.)

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