aad's Calendialing Topic (Until Returns Diminish)

[aad]

This is my 2nd or 3rd attempt at calendialish journalling. Intentionally cryptic motivation: I found reason to reevaluate whether to adjust my relationship with Beeminder. This thread will serve that purpose, I hope!

Playbook

• Public meta-goal: calendial – aad – beeminder, set at +1 week
• +1 strictly for: reviewing the most burdening goals for the coming week(s), ordered by beebudget load

[aad]

2025-12-14

Here’s what beebudget.deno.dev is reporting at the moment.

A few weeks back I’ve started going through CS:APP and SICP both at a pretty ambitious rate: ~25 minutes a day (0.41 hours/day to be precise)

At this ambitious rate, with two activities similar to each other, I’m getting a bit tired.

Besides, I’m expecting weeks where I’ll need to travel.

So I want to:

• Reduce cs-comp-arch – aad – beeminder by 25% (to 0.30822/day) for a week

I feel like can go through next week just not derailing… but I at least want to have some more breathing room after that.

p.s. visual graph editor keeps hanging… I initially wanted to keep the goal date and total fixed, so that I’d be reminded of the impact of this change. But well, here’s the configuration pre this change. Goal date: 2026-11-22 / Total: 150 / Daily slope: 0.41209

[aad]

2025-12-18

cs-comp-arch is still the highest loading goal. cs-struc-inter the one after that.

It’s now a certainty that I’ll travel in the coming weeks to support family with healthcare.

So:

• cs-comp-arch goes down to 0.05151 hours/day for between 25 Dec and 3 Jan
• cs-struc-inter goes down to 0.0685 hours/day for the same period

They both got halved. That’s +2 for the calendialing goal. (I’m ratcheting calendialing goal to 7 days from now, too.)

[aad]

(My calendial goal is orange, so here we go:)

I’m really happy with the earlier changes. I’ve managed to get both of the goals into safe territory before I traveled abroad.

Beebudget reports my running goal as the highest loading goal. I have my running gear with me as I’m away from home, I’ll be back home in 9 days, and otherwise I’m happy with the rate. So no changes.

Side note on beebudget and the playbook of this topic

When I made beebudget, I wanted to try out the idea quickly. It uses the goal configuration (which I believe means the last segment of the red line). Now that I’m using Beeminder in a slightly different way, this isn’t working well for me anymore. Until the next calendialing, I may fix that, or complicate the playbook to account for this.

[aad]

Beebudget reports my general deck spaced repetition as the goal that’ll require the most time until Jan 7.

Follow up to the side note

Beebudget now reports what I need So the statement above is based on the red bright line.

This is worthy of the time I’m putting in. At about 15 minutes per unit progress and 0.71/day, this goal doesn’t need dialing.

[aad]

Beebudget points to my CS:APP study goal.

Mentioned earlier in this topic, I’m studying this alongside SICP.

Leaving the why aside, this is part of a larger plan to study https://teachyourselfcs.com/ curriculum.

I grabbed onto their anchor and set out to study 150 hours spread over about a year:

This is the lowest level Computer Science material I’ve ever studied besides a introduction to computing course I took about 15 years ago. I find it mildly interesting and fun.

After ~13 hours and 1 derailment (a silly 5$ one, due to New Year’s Eve), a few things are clear to me:

• I don’t want to be pushed so much to stick to this.
• I don’t have an important reason to finish studying this in a year.
• I don’t want to invest equally into studying SICP and CS:APP.

So I’m dialing this goal down:

• Keeping the goal of studying 150 hours fixed, I moved the goal date to 2027-12-01.
• This brings down the daily slope to about 12 minutes.
• Scheduled a pledge reduction to 5$ too.

[aad]

My calendial goal is at 7d mark again.

Beebudget reports:

• Total time commitment of upcoming 7 days: 4h 32m 22s.
• Biggest contributor: cs-prog-struc-interp (SICP): 1h 35m 23s.

Why I’m busy with this goal?

• It’s written in a way I like and find intellectually pleasing to be busy with.
• I also expect it to help with interviews and to have some signaling value, especially relevant in an era of vibe-coding as a self-taught programmer.

Total investment so far

• Time: 11:11
• Derailments: 0

I like being busy with this. Sometimes I get confused about why I’m doing it, since it serves two purposes. I want to stay busy and explore that “tension” a bit more.

So no changes to this goal.

[aad]

My calendial goal has a very comfortable buffer but due to upcoming travel plans, I touched my highest loading goal. Here’s an update about that.

Beebudget reports:

• A total time commitment of 4h 05m 12s for the upcoming 7 days.
• Biggest contributor: cs-prog-struc-interp (SICP): 2h 00m 39s.

Like noted last time, it feels good to stay busy with this. But I’ll be traveling back home to support my father and family during a hospital visit.

So my short-term goal is staying above the red line within the akrasia horizon. Until 23rd of January, I’ll consider anything beyond that a bonus.

My long-term goal didn’t change. So:

• Came up with adjusted time commitments based on days: ½ pomodoro per tightly-constrained days (e.g. flight days, surgery day, etc.), ⅔ on the rest. Intentionally ambitious.
• I entered this into the graph editor, which led to a rate that was ~3 times the last time I did this travel a few weeks back. I concluded my ambition had overshooted into unrealistic territory.
• So I capped my ambition at 2 times the previous time.

My graph now looks like:

This +1 for calendialing goal means I now have a 20 day buffer. So I’m also ratcheting my calendial goal back to 7 days.