Okay the stretching habit is working. Also the strategy habit.
If you ask me what beeminder delivers at it’s core. It’s the awareness that something needs to be happening, because otherwise you fail. Nobody wants to fail.
Now I want to code more (Rails & React). Tracked it myself. I didn’t reach goals of x hours per day. So I’m going to use beeminder + rescuetime.
I’m confident this gives me the mental sting I need.
Results will be posted again on the forum.
After 13 days didn’t make the cut of doing 20hours/week of software development via the API of rescue time.
$5 wasn’t a big enough sting.
Next I am:
Going to create a “derivative habit” on this coding habit. Anyone doing this kind of derivative tactic? (So they don’t fail the primary habit)
Any other smart beeminder hacks / resources on this?
Most of my beeminders have derivatives, or helpers. Another concept is
that many things, you care about the end result, but the end result isn’t
actionable. For instance–weight. Many people put the non-actionable
thing that they care about with a good amount of safety buffer, and a very
low pledge cap, and put the helper habits that are actionable like “drink a
glass of water before every meal” or “go out to eat less” with higher
pledge caps.
@adamwolf thanks for the input. Currently applied the derivative to hours developed. Have been thinking about upgrading to premium to add several more goals and go deeper on the derivatives. Currently increased my minimum required dev hours from 3 a day to 4.3 per day.
Interesting discovery, it’s not the hours, but the hours of deep work that count.
Another interesting discovery, you call them helpers. TBH, I like that even more.
Discovery: Beeminding is like TDD (test driven development)
You can write unit tests. (beginner: you track 3 habits)
You can write integration tests. (advanced: you track x habits, consisting of “piped / chained” habits)
have a good weekend 
Note to self: So instead of using the words like: the ideal, optimal, goal or target. Use words like bare necessity, absolute minimum, worst case scenario and acceptable lower bound.
next: exploring x & y axis for deep work.
In my experience using a lot of derivatives backfires, as it becomes increasingly hard to control the whole system. When my conditions changed (I went on vacation) it suddenly became unmanageable, even after my return. Don’t get me wrong, I used scheduled breaks and when I understood that overestimated my ability to be on top of selected goals, the support was there for me. But the mere size of it makes it hard to calibrate and recalibrate. I’m now trying not to exceed 15, ideally 10 goals. Not quite there yet, but I’m working on it.
The only way that I manage my 48 active goals is because of my premium subscription that lets me set a lot of the pledges to $0. Even that’s a delicate balance because I mustn’t get used to things derailing or they lose all power. (Here’s hoping for an uncle button soon.)
thanks @wswld & @philip I’ve been working with the free version, so I’m excited to start with the premium thing soon
Note to self:
(Deep) Work Accomplished = Time Spent x Intensity
Time spent = At least 2 hours undistracted
Instead of goal setting, fear/risk setting could be a better operating system with beeminder: http://tim.blog/2017/05/15/fear-setting/
It happened. I went premium. I hate the sting, but it’s necessary to be more aware of when i’m not mindful and show impulsive behaviour.
New Bminders:
I’ll could be doing more bminders with my finance education & development hours.
reflection on the current stings:
finances
works like a charm, i’m in control of my expenses
zerocoffee
I only had 2 coffeedays in the last month, that means 30+ days without coffee. I only drink when there’s a necessity and I even think I can just say no and ask for water when the next time comes up.
wakeup
archived this one while writing this, beeminder had not enough meaning
sleep
archived this one while writing this, beeminder had not enough meaning
exercise
still going strong, everyday exercising 7 days a week (missed only once or twice in the last year)
coding
about 2.5 hours on average every day. I want to move this upwards.
Today is the anniversary that I joined Beeminder, 
my helpers don’t work. Have to think about fixing that.
I also see that I don’t do anything about a beeminder when all in the green. Although it would be beneficial if I would be doing it. So I just added a sharpening the saw sting, just adding points to beeminder already in the green.
Consider max safe days to cut down your safety buffer when you are “not
doing anything when you’re in the green”. It’s been working well for me.
Nice, but: Automatic safety buffer capping is part of the Bee Plus premium plan…
Need to improve my dev skills to get more of that monthly $. I guess i’ll be making the slope abit steeper then.
Ahh.
Something I did when safety buffer capping was in a more expensive tier and
I didn’t want to pay up for it was set up a weekly "review beeminder"
cadence, where I had a set of questions I worked through for each goal,
including reducing my safety buffer if appropriate.
What is this “derivative”/“helper” thing you are talking about?
smart.
let say you want to get into bed at 22:00 then a derivative / helper could be:
so basically anything that helps you with the primary beeminder.
Started with reading & implementing Getting things done. And implemented a weekly review beeminder.
So far it has a significant positive impact on my wellbeing. Anyone else has experimented with GTD ?