Hello! My name is Russell, and this is my second attempt at using Beeminder. I used to just derail constantly and feel awful about myself all the time. But now I don’t. I’ve only derailed once, I haven’t archived any goals, and I even managed to build up lots of safety buffer with the excess motivation and time I have. I think the main difference that has allowed me to succeed has been setting time limits on goals. I think this feature of Beeminder should be advocated for more often.
For me personally, I see derailments as failures. Still learning experiences, but also still failures. Each derailment is demotivating, no matter how many times I’ve read the “Derailing It is Nailing It” post. That’s why I really like bounded goals. With infinite goals, it’s basically impossible to avoid derailing. You can’t succeed at something forever, and so it feels like you’re just postponing how long it is until you fail. I love deadline goals because there is a tangible sense of reaching victory. You don’t need to be perfect forever. All you need to do is reach the deadline, and you’ve succeeded! It gives you a set date to reevaluate whether you want that goal to stay in your life, and if you do, you can restart it! If you don’t, no worries! You already reached your goal, and so you can safely discard it without berating yourself.
This is my personal love letter to goals with deadlines. All of my Beeminder goals have deadlines, and that’s what makes them so effective for me.
Danny Reeves from the Beeminder team brought up Cranial Silicosis as a flaw of the system, and I can see why that could be a problem. But I think the same thing applies to regular goals too! I had a Japanese reading goal of 10 minutes every day, and I stayed mostly on track, derailing twice and [link to Fake Data Is The Devil | Beeminder Blog inserted by dreev]. I archived it after I finished my book and was floundering around, trying to find something else to read that interested me. I think if I had set it as a bounded goal that finished at the end of my target book, I would have derailed less and wouldn’t have faked any data, and the end of the goal would have felt like a victory. Archivement always feels like failure for me. I think that bounded goals can be a great option for anybody that doesn’t have any difficulty starting new goals, but has trouble following through with them.
I also think bounded goals help increase your self confidence and motivation more than usual goals. I think of it in terms of Expectancy in the Motivation = (EV)/(ID) equation. A derailment/archivement hurts your expectancy a lot more than the daily small wins help it, because of stimulus desensitization. Eventually, you get used to the regular small wins, but the big, irregular derailments continue to hurt considerably. To combat that, you need to have large milestones that signal your success and help your expectancy while also limiting the number of archivements and derailments. Bounded goals achieve both of these in one simple solution. They also allow for natural breaks, eg. a deload week at the end of a training cycle, without messing with your graph.
Danny also brought up the hashtag feature as a potential way to mark milestones, but that doesn’t feel as satisfying as reaching the big target at the end of the graph. Flat spots signal slacking or derailment for me, no matter the reason really.
What are everyone’s thoughts on bounded goals? I’d be very curious about how fellow akratics think about the difference between endless and bounded goals.
