A challenge: add data to X Beeminder goals today!

With trying to get safety buffer on all my goals, I ended up doing an experiment yesterday. I thought about how many goals I have (turns out there’s more than I thought: 71!?) and came up with a number I thought would be challenging and force some progress on goals that are just sitting around. That ended up being 20, because that’s at least a third more than the number of goals that would ever normally be due on a given day (and 4x the number that were actually due).

Aaaand I made one of my Most Important Tasks for the day “add data to 20 Beeminder goals”. It turned out to be a really good choice: a big enough number that I was stretched beyond what I would normally do, small enough that it was infinitely doable.

I’ve done it again for today and will do it again tomorrow too to help me earn some safety buffer.

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Amazing that you have 71 goals! How do you manage to have that many without just going crazy and giving up on all of them? Every time I’ve tried to come close to that many I just fall apart.

And only 15 are normally due on a given day? How do you space them all out and ensure that you don’t have like 40 hit at once?

I could really use some tips on beeminding lots of things and trying to get safety buffer! It’s tricky to get the right settings for the goal rate and the “max days” autoratchet cap - I always seem to bounce back and forth between way too much slack and way too little.

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Also, I made a post on a related topic - I would love to know your thoughts:

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The number has grown pretty naturally over time, which helps to stagger when the commitments bite; a while ago I settled at around 50 and felt like it was a lot. I think it helps that they have fairly different time investments and timescales – some take a while but are due once a week, some are fine if I’m doing them daily and keeping them up, some are almost trivial to actually achieve but high-impact in terms of benefits…

My first step was beeminding my emergency days, so that there’s a penalty for being in the red. (Not an immediate one – but if I’m running all my goals into the red, it bites pretty fast.) I also don’t have any auto-ratchets, because many of my goals are the super simple “enter +1 when successful” types that are due 6 days/week, and gaining buffer for those is very slow.

I’ve now gone from “orange is the new red” (i.e. consider orange the beemergency) to trying to get to “blue is the new red”. This is trickier to beemind; probably easier if I had @adamwolf’s urgency load thing, but for now it’s just a goal.

I think it may also depend on how much satisfaction you get out of seeing your dashboard all orange/blue/green… personally, it makes me feel like I’m on top of things and thus it’s a kind of goal in itself.

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