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!
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:
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
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:
They both got halved. That’s +2 for the calendialing goal. (I’m ratcheting calendialing goal to 7 days from now, too.)
(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.
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.
Beebudget reports my general deck spaced repetition as the goal that’ll require the most time until Jan 7.
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.
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:
So I’m dialing this goal down:
My calendial goal is at 7d mark again.
Beebudget reports:
cs-prog-struc-interp (SICP): 1h 35m 23s.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.
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:
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:
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.
The week flew by… Beebudget keeps reporting the same. So it’s time to adjust the playbook.
About half of my committed time for the upcoming week are for goals tagged #study:
This isn’t representative of the relative priority of these goals in my life at the moment.
When my current “dialled down” period ends in about a week, these goals will actually cover about ~60% of my total commitment.
I’ll be taking steps to align my commitments and my time commitment. Starting with: aad/epistemic-hygiene
This is a new goal that gets its data from Toggl. Only the time I spent “working on” (reading, writing, actively thinking) gissues tagged with “epistemic-hygiene” counts towards this.
(I was lazy naming this, I’d like to adjust later. It’s not a bad name your associations will likely be related to what I’m working on.)
It’s currently at 0.14286/day. For now I’ll
This brings the goal date from towards the end of the year to 5th of July.
One of my 2026 ambitions is to use translate the effectiveness I get from Beeminder for than running and flossing to other goals. So I’d like to start increasing rates of my other goals or adding new ones, until my Beeminder commitments are proportional to my goals. Not sure if all of them will be beemindable, but between beebudget and toggle, I may be able to capture any activity. That’s the ambition anyway.
The playbook becomes:
I’d like to also add how I currently think about my higher level goals in this context, but that’ll be another time.
Here’s a try-out of the updated playbook.
Here’s the current week-ahead committed time, grouped by tag:
Total: ~13h 27m.
I think meta is overestimated by 2-4 hours, for reasons not important.
My top priority right now is “Romantic relationship / Partner”, which has 0% explicit representation in my current commitments.
So I’ve added a new goal: attendio. Set at 10 minutes/day, tracking time spent (individually) in service of my romantic relationship. Concretely, things like:
What doesn’t count is time spent together. This is about attention, not proximity.
The commitment is deliberately modest. I’ve eeven put a 7 day long flatline at the start: I’ve just come out of a busy period and there’s a backlog to work through, which Beebudget helpfully keeps pointing out.
This is very much a step-1 move. I’m trying to see whether making this part of Beeminder turns out to be useful and fun at all.
Step in the right direction. Beebudget supports this use-case for me now.
Here’s the current week-ahead committed time for Thu, 5 Feb 2026, broken down by tags:
Total: ~16h 43m.
Same pattern as last week: if something isn’t tagged and scheduled, it quietly goes to zero. Right now that missing priority is Friends.
So I’ll create a new goal: friendio (link coming up), tracking minutes of intentional friendship upkeep. Starting at 5 minutes/day.
What counts:
What doesn’t count:
Time spent together doesn’t count. This is about upkeep actions that keep the relationship warm between hangs.
5 minutes/day is deliberately small. The point is representing this in Beeminder, and seeing how that feels.
Beebudget keeps supporting me… but one of the “destructive” buttons have caused me to lose estimates for my non-timey goals. Which may skew things…
Here’s the current situation:
Total: ~15h 59m.
It’s not visible here but I’ve also worked more (and more intensely this week).
I’m a bit tired. I can go for one more week, but then I need to have built some buffer.
The easiest way to take a step in the right direction is reducing the load of goals in the top 2 categories:
gissue-refreshening was scheduled to a gradual increase, I borrowed some from the future to get rid of the increase:
A similar but more pronounced change for cs-prog-struc-interp
My current playbook says: note the committed-time percentages, then adjust toward life goals.
It’s been a few very busy weeks. I procrastinated a lot on study goals, which brought me too close to the red line more than I’d like. I’ve [mostly] stayed above the line. I’m finally able to build some breathing room.
First an update on the relevant themes: I’ve been carrying “work” as a single priority, but that bundles a day job and a career venture, although the two come with very different energies. I also bumped “health” and “learning” above “meaning". Priorities/themes for the short-term future:
| Tag | % |
|---|---|
| meta | 35.3 |
| study | 23.6 |
| music | 15.1 |
| health | 12.1 |
| truth | 10.4 |
| partner | 2.2 |
| dutch | 1.1 |
| friends | 0.1 |
The change in priorities makes one thing very apparent: Venture gets no dedicated time.
Looking at Beebudget output, looks like this category is also under-committed, but there are parts of my relationship that’s not relevant (and is not captured) in this context.
Most of my meta and study time are in the mornings. So far, I’ve carved some time for Venture spontaneously. A few things have become clear to me:
I’m thinking introducing some structure to my mornings may be an interesting experiment. My current morning window is ~1–1.5 hours, 4-5 days of the week. On short mornings, block 1 goes to meta, and I pick one of study or venture for block 2.
I’ll add another time-based goal “venture.” Gently at 5 mins/week, since I’m still busy building up buffer with study goals.
I’ll also bump partner commitment to 10 mins/day, since there are some projects/ideas I’d like to pursue on that end.
Derailments since last update:
It feels a reasonable amount to be kept accountable for this. I’m experience some resistance for going ahead, but globally I want to stick to it.
I’d not want to pay $5 every month to my study goals, considering my Beeminder budget + relative importance of other goals where I can better use this budget.
Here’s the current week-ahead committed time for Thu, 5 Mar 2026:
Total: ~15h 14m.
Short-term priorities/themes (top): Partner, Venture, Physical health, Learning, Meaning.
Keeping the note I’ve written about “partner” in mind, the obvious mismatch is Venture is priority #2 but only ~2% of explicit commitments.
Here’s a list of updates of the week:
Hello, some questions:
Why do you learn Dutch? Maybe it was already mentioned, but I lost it.
What is truth goal about, I mean what you physically do, meditate?
I find your system interesting because you try to bend your time (directly) to match your priorities. It reminds me of https://mapofwhy.app/ this project.
Your mapofwhy.app association resonates with me, I really appreciate you sharing this!
I live in the Netherlands but I’m not born or raised here. I’m immersed in the language and already speak pretty well. My current intention is remain mindful of where I can become more expressive, idiomatic, and how I can signal some culturally relevant messages effectively as I speak.
(Your last few messages make me think you’re interested in languages? Perhaps an idea to brew/knit/work on a “how to improve your language skills with beeminder” community-post for the blog. Also thinking of @scarabaea. [Also @dreev since it’s related to another conversation we’re having.])
At the moment the primary activity is following a reading plan that I find intellectually and emotionally challenging for various reasons. The content relates to truth, but equally important is that I exercise reducing my reflexive “I should’ve already learned/digested/understood.” reaction which I experience as a distraction from the truth and a breeding place for other thoughts which apparently can take over my mind.
Good luck
Yes, I enjoy languages; maybe I can write something to become a reference point for the people joining the community - nonetheless my advice would be bland and generic.
I like to break it down by techniques of SLA - so I think you can make progress in microlearning (small exercises like Anki, Duolingo) and in comprehensible input (beemind listening, repetition). In general I use beeminder to destroy backlogs - 30 podcast episodes explaining grammar - perfect use case.
In retrospective I think I could’ve done it much faster, for example investing in a tutor or moving to Spain, but speaking Spanish always has been a side quest.
Circling back to your original idea, the problem here is that it’s easier to do what’s measurable. Secondly, scope creep. Beeminder goals easily spill horizontally (one more language course). In other words, especially advancing mentally, spiritually requires depth. Moving to a different country, getting out of comfort zone. It is hard to model it with the red line (it never was a promise of beeminder anyway haha).
Derailments since last update:
Pretty weird, this one… My piano teacher wasn’t motivating, to the point I’d rather not touch the piano than workpracticefor the lessons. And when I did touch the piano, I’d have fun, but not practice for the lessons. It was time to stop the lessons and I have.
I’ve made a self-directed plan using Claude, and I’m curious how the rest of this journey will go.
Here’s the current week-ahead committed time for Thu, 12 Mar 2026:
This 7-day view understates health (~13%), but looking 14 days out it’s ~28%. Second only to meta.
Last week, I had added venture, which directly got a big “motivated first week” buffer. It doesn’t enter beebudget’s radar even at 14 days.
This week’s calendialing action will be to trim the venture buffer to 7 days.
edit: Even with that, it entered the list at 3%. So I’ve also upped my commitment from ~0.2 to 0.3 hours day, which brings it to 5%
Time for another update. This time I’ll try adding one more layer to my personal context: Toggl Track data.
Since the last post, I’ve derailed once more with: music-piano: $5 (total so far: $15)
I stopped piano lessons last week and switched to a self-directed plan. I’ve then basically flatlined for a whole week. On the beemergency day, life happened. Since then, things have improved:
I’ve identified the friction in the my self-directed plan. Let’s see how it goes. If I can’t make it work, I may start taking lessons, I’ve already found a candidate instructor that I think will fit me better.
Week-ahead committed time:
| Tag | 7d % | 14d % |
|---|---|---|
| meta | 30.1 | 26.5 |
| friends | 16.7 | 14.3 |
| study | 16.6 | 11.9 |
| health | 13.9 | 24.5 |
| truth | 11.4 | 7.7 |
| venture | 4.8 | 5.5 |
| music | 4.7 | 5.9 |
| partner | 0.0 | 2.2 |
| dutch | 1.9 | 1.3 |
Total (7d): ~17h 17m.
(The differences between 7-14 day are due to buffer I have.)
Let’s see how this looks when my Toggl Track data comes into perspective. Here’s some context to my tracking habit:
226h tracked, 7.55h/day average.
| Category | Hours | % |
|---|---|---|
| Work | 150.9 | 66.7 |
| Meta (Gissues, Beeminder, beebudget) | ~25.0 | 11.0 |
| Study (SICP + CS:APP + Anki) | 15.3 | 6.7 |
| Truth | 8.8 | 3.9 |
| Music (Piano + Ear Training + Singing) | 8.8 | 3.9 |
| Venture | 8.0 | 3.5 |
| Partner | 4.7 | 2.1 |
| Friends | 4.0 | 1.8 |
If I leave out work:
| Category | 30d hours | Daily avg | % of discretionary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta | 25.0 | 50 min | 33% |
| Study (SICP, CS:APP, Anki) | 15.3 | 31 min | 20% |
| Truth | 8.8 | 18 min | 12% |
| Music (Piano, Ear, Singing) | 8.8 | 18 min | 12% |
| Venture | 8.0 | 16 min | 11% |
| Partner | 4.7 | 9 min | 6% |
| Friends | 4.0 | 8 min | 5% |
| Other | ~1.0 | — | ~1% |
| Total discretionary | ~75h | ~2.5h/day |
For now, at least for the rest of March, I’ll take 2.5h/day to be the limit of how much “discretionary time” I have. I’m not interested in trying to squeeze more. (I’m not sure if it’d be healthy for me.)
But… wow! So I have 17.5h/week discretionary time and next week I’ve already committed ~17 hours to Beeminder. (My Beebudget estimates arent very precise, so this could easily be off by 10%.)
Let’s compare this to my priorities:
| Priority | Rank | Discretionary % | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Partner | #1 | 6% | Low, but partly by design (time together isn’t tracked) |
| Venture | #2 | 11% | Under-represented — 16 min/day for a #2 priority |
| Health | #3 | (Tracked via Strava, not in Toggl) | Appears healthy from beebudget |
| Learning | #4 | 20% | Generous for a #4 |
| Meaning | #5 | 12% | Appropriate |
| Friends | #9 | 5% | Temporarily elevated (rolodex); will drop |
This is looking okay, except… I want to scale up my venture efforts starting from April.
Based on all I have, it seems clear to me that I’m facing trade-offs here. My initial ideas:
I want to already experiment with this in the rest of March. So:
