I’m new to Beeminder, and one of the things I love most about this forum is hearing from all the awesome people using Beeminder in interesting ways.
Having just wrapped up the year, I thought it might be interesting to reflect together on our Beeminder journeys from the past 12 months. I’ve put together a few questions as conversation starters, but please share whatever resonates with you:
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What was your favorite goal this year? What made it stand out?
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How has your relationship with Beeminder evolved? Did you discover any techniques or mindset shifts that made it more effective for you?
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What did you let go of? Were there any goals or approaches you abandoned because they weren’t serving you?
Looking forward to hearing everyone’s stories and learning from what worked (and what didn’t) for all of you!
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Favorite Goal
My favorite goal I made this past year was my wakeup goal. It tracks how many minutes after 7am I wake up. This goal has been invaluable during the winter, when waking up is hard due to lack of light. It’s also cool to get cool metrics and see my average wakeup time (and variation) go down over time.
What makes this goal awesome? It gives me more time in the morning. I now have been able to practice music singing because I have time in my day before work starts, which is something that makes me really happy. It’s also a super simple goal and is easy to track.
How has your relationship with Beeminder evolved?
I’m still new to Beeminder, so I’m sure it will evolve much more over the course of the next year, but so far the biggest shift has been has been using Beeminder as a forcing function when excitement wanes during a long-running project.
The goal that comes to mind is my Job Interview Prep goal. I was originally using Beeminder as a way to add gasoline to the fire, since I was already excited about the project and it helped me work even harder. Now that I’m in a waning phase of my excitement, it’s still nice to have the goal there because I don’t have to feel guilty - I know that as long as I’m doing the amount equal to what is in my goal then I’ve met my commitment to myself.
I’d also note that I don’t have any auto data goals. I’d like some, since it would be great to not track everything, but I’m not sure how to do that with my current setup.
What did you let go of?
Never derailing. I’ve now derailed a few times and learned that it isn’t so bad, and I don’t need to be perfect, as long as I’m moving in the direction of my goal overall.
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Favorite Goal
Dare I say poisson/phone_away, even though I only started it in September? The goal requires me to keep my phone “away” (either plugged in or inside a bag / other container that isn’t my pocket), at least 18.5 hours a day currently. (Actually, more than that—any clock hour where the phone is out, I lose the whole hour). It’s been life-changing.
How has your relationship with Beeminder evolved?
It’s just the same old cycles. I go through phases of having too many goals and kind of losing motivation for some of then, archiving old goals or making new ones I’m more excited about, and feeling motivated again.
What did you let go of?
There are specific goals I’ve archived or set to zero slope, of course, but there are so many goals that have been started or ended, this is just part of the cycle of beeminder.
I reduced the number of goals I had that tracked the time spent on specific work projects / areas. (Was this early 2025? It could have been late 2024…) It mostly just felt like they were counterproductive because if I was in the red on one I might end up needing to work on it when I really should be working on something else. This was the right call, for sure.
I stopped trying to lose weight (I’m happy with where I am), and put a flat slope on the weight goal. This is fine but I should probably make a meta goal or something to force myself to actually weigh myself and not gain weight—I don’t think I’ve weighed myself in months!
I’ve also had a flat slope on my Japanese goal all year. I don’t regret this; I already have more hobbies than time. But perhaps I’ll consider resuming studying some time soon.
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Thanks for your response! Awesome to hear from somebody How did you implement your phone_away goal?
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I enter the phone_away data completely manually! However, if you are interested in automating a similar goal, you may be interested in Put phone away box .
If I had a bit less trust in myself and wanted an intermediate level of automation, I would make a spreadsheet and enter a “1” in every hour I didn’t use the phone, since I already have some scripts set up for sending data from spreadsheets to beeminder. Actually, maybe this is still worth considering.
It also could be cool to use a phone script/automation that puts those 1’s in the spreadsheet. I currently have it set up to do something similar automatically, and it could definitely be interesting.
I have a phone goal that’s working OK for me as it is but I’m tempted to try switching it around.
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