Success with 15-minute cleans

Hello,

My wife and I have had good results in the apartment cleaning department by
Beeminding what we call “15-minute cleans”.

How the goal works:

  • A 15-minute clean is exactly what it sounds like. You clean for 15
    minutes (with a timer) and then enter a “1” into Beeminder.
  • You can only do one per day. You can’t clean for 30 minutes and enter “2”.
  • If the apartment is completely clean at the end of the day, you get to
    enter a “1” without doing anything.

Why we like it:

  • We think it is easier to keep a clean apartment clean than to clean a
    dirty one. (See Broken Windows Theory
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows).
    *** There is a built-in reward for getting the apartment all the way clean.
    It’s rare that it actually happens, but it is good motivation.
    *** Binge-cleaning isn’t rewarded by the goal. The optimal way to get
    points is to do a 15-minute clean every day, and that prevents things from
    spiraling out of control.
  • Beeminding by “minutes of cleaning” sometimes presents you with
    gargantuan amounts of cleaning to do in a single day, but the most you can
    ever need to do for this goal is 15 minutes.
  • You don’t need to Take a Break for vacations if you get the apartment
    completely cleaned up before you go. In a way, choosing not to Take a Break
    is committing to cleaning up before you go. Then you get to come back to a
    clean place.

I’d be interested to hear if anybody does anything similar.

Cheers,
Sean


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I mostly love this but I think I’d like the simpler version – beemind
15 minutes of cleaning per day – even better. In the akratic steady
state (always skating the edge) that also results in exactly 15
minutes each day. And it’s a more meaningful graph – you see total
minutes of cleaning, which might be useful to decide about
outsourcing. Or just be interesting.

(Pro-tip: Beemind hours of cleaning because you can still enter “0:15”
or “0:20” which gets translated as .25 or .3333. That makes it
compatible with the built-in timer in the Beeminder Android app as
well. Super-pro-tip: You can convert an existing goal from minutes to
hours by rescaling everything by 1/60 in Terrifyingly Advanced
Settings.)

Anyway, why I think the simple version is at least as good as your
version, Sean:

  1. You can retroratchet (or autoratchet if premium) to avoid rewarding
    binge cleaning.
  2. Reward for hitting a Totally Clean state: I’d say just dial down
    the road if that can ever happen, since I anticipate diminishing
    returns on cleaning effort anyway. But I’m a slob so don’t listen to
    me. You could also just have projects in reserve like finding things
    to donate that could count towards the goal if the house is ever
    already Totally Clean.
  3. How could a “15 minutes/day” goal ever require more than 15 minutes
    in a single day? I don’t think that can happen!
  4. Is it hard to remember to schedule a break for vacations? We want
    that to be super easy, and we think it’s good for the graph to reflect
    reality in that way.

I hate to discourage creative beeminding though. I’m just hung up on
the Quantified Self aspect of it.

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 5:34 PM, Sean Fellows oaks64@gmail.com wrote:

Hello,

My wife and I have had good results in the apartment cleaning department by
Beeminding what we call “15-minute cleans”.

How the goal works:

  • A 15-minute clean is exactly what it sounds like. You clean for 15 minutes
    (with a timer) and then enter a “1” into Beeminder.
  • You can only do one per day. You can’t clean for 30 minutes and enter “2”.
  • If the apartment is completely clean at the end of the day, you get to
    enter a “1” without doing anything.

Why we like it:

  • We think it is easier to keep a clean apartment clean than to clean a
    dirty one. (See Broken Windows Theory).
    *** There is a built-in reward for getting the apartment all the way clean.
    It’s rare that it actually happens, but it is good motivation.
    *** Binge-cleaning isn’t rewarded by the goal. The optimal way to get points
    is to do a 15-minute clean every day, and that prevents things from
    spiraling out of control.
  • Beeminding by “minutes of cleaning” sometimes presents you with gargantuan
    amounts of cleaning to do in a single day, but the most you can ever need to
    do for this goal is 15 minutes.
  • You don’t need to Take a Break for vacations if you get the apartment
    completely cleaned up before you go. In a way, choosing not to Take a Break
    is committing to cleaning up before you go. Then you get to come back to a
    clean place.

I’d be interested to hear if anybody does anything similar.

Cheers,
Sean


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“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
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http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

Thanks for the detailed response!

I omitted a bit of history, which is that our 15-minute clean thing
pre-dates our use of Beeminder. When I started using Beeminder, it felt
natural to start keeping track of it. But maybe you’re right that tracking
hours of cleaning (thanks for the pro-tips) is just as good / better.

  1. To begin with, simpler is always better by default. :slight_smile:
  2. You are probably right that automatic retroratchet on the “minutes per
    day” goal is the equivalent of this. So in some ways this is my way of
    working around the lack of premium features.
  3. You’re right that Totally Clean is sufficiently rare that it doesn’t
    need a lot of consideration in designing the goal.
  4. Er…right. I still goof this up in my head sometimes, that the units
    on the Road Dial don’t actually matter (that is, the goal is enforced daily
    even if the units are set to “weekly”. You would think I would have
    internalized this by now lol)
  5. Really the only thing that is hard about Take a Break is that I have to
    do it on all the goals individually. Being able to select multiple goals
    and apply a Take a Break to the selected ones all at once would be nice.

I appreciate you taking the time to discourage pointlessly complex
Beeminding. It is fun being creative and all, but I think you are actually
right that it would just be the same difference if we track hours and
retroratchet. So I suppose I can just scale up this goal by 1/4 and then it
is in hours.

Cheers,
Sean

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

I mostly love this but I think I’d like the simpler version – beemind
15 minutes of cleaning per day – even better. In the akratic steady
state (always skating the edge) that also results in exactly 15
minutes each day. And it’s a more meaningful graph – you see total
minutes of cleaning, which might be useful to decide about
outsourcing. Or just be interesting.

(Pro-tip: Beemind hours of cleaning because you can still enter “0:15”
or “0:20” which gets translated as .25 or .3333. That makes it
compatible with the built-in timer in the Beeminder Android app as
well. Super-pro-tip: You can convert an existing goal from minutes to
hours by rescaling everything by 1/60 in Terrifyingly Advanced
Settings.)

Anyway, why I think the simple version is at least as good as your
version, Sean:

  1. You can retroratchet (or autoratchet if premium) to avoid rewarding
    binge cleaning.
  2. Reward for hitting a Totally Clean state: I’d say just dial down
    the road if that can ever happen, since I anticipate diminishing
    returns on cleaning effort anyway. But I’m a slob so don’t listen to
    me. You could also just have projects in reserve like finding things
    to donate that could count towards the goal if the house is ever
    already Totally Clean.
  3. How could a “15 minutes/day” goal ever require more than 15 minutes
    in a single day? I don’t think that can happen!
  4. Is it hard to remember to schedule a break for vacations? We want
    that to be super easy, and we think it’s good for the graph to reflect
    reality in that way.

I hate to discourage creative beeminding though. I’m just hung up on
the Quantified Self aspect of it.

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 5:34 PM, Sean Fellows oaks64@gmail.com wrote:

Hello,

My wife and I have had good results in the apartment cleaning department
by
Beeminding what we call “15-minute cleans”.

How the goal works:

  • A 15-minute clean is exactly what it sounds like. You clean for 15
    minutes
    (with a timer) and then enter a “1” into Beeminder.
  • You can only do one per day. You can’t clean for 30 minutes and enter
    “2”.
  • If the apartment is completely clean at the end of the day, you get to
    enter a “1” without doing anything.

Why we like it:

  • We think it is easier to keep a clean apartment clean than to clean a
    dirty one. (See Broken Windows Theory).
    *** There is a built-in reward for getting the apartment all the way
    clean.
    It’s rare that it actually happens, but it is good motivation.
    *** Binge-cleaning isn’t rewarded by the goal. The optimal way to get
    points
    is to do a 15-minute clean every day, and that prevents things from
    spiraling out of control.
  • Beeminding by “minutes of cleaning” sometimes presents you with
    gargantuan
    amounts of cleaning to do in a single day, but the most you can ever
    need to
    do for this goal is 15 minutes.
  • You don’t need to Take a Break for vacations if you get the apartment
    completely cleaned up before you go. In a way, choosing not to Take a
    Break
    is committing to cleaning up before you go. Then you get to come back to
    a
    clean place.

I’d be interested to hear if anybody does anything similar.

Cheers,
Sean


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“Akratics Anonymous” group.
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http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.