First a meta remark: I’m finding it difficult to figure out a good structure for these updates and parts of it feel a bit stale…
I’m looking at Beebudget at 7, 14 and 30 days now.
The 7-day snapshot remains not very insightful in isolation. The 14d and 30d views reveal… a potentially scary situation.
Total committed load looks like: 2.8 h/day at 7d → 3.9 h/day at 14d → 4.9 h/day at 30d.
That 30 day rate is very scary compared to 2.6 hours of non-work hours I’m dedicated to tracked activities.
I can account for one of the ~2 hours between 7 day and 30 day difference, but not the other.
Before I panic, I’ll be looking into improving time estimates of Beebudget by cross-referencing Beeminder deltas and Toggle data.
Besides those general points:
Venture is absent at 7d (full buffer), 1.5% at 14d, only 5.2% at 30d. Beeminder demands ~15 min/day long-run for my #2 priority.
Looking at Toggl data.
Venture: 25 min/day actual over 30 days, but only 6 min/day in the past week. That’s what happens when Beeminder isn’t biting… with a comfortable buffer, motivation alone doesn’t sustain the rate.
Actions:
The key to improving Beebudget estimates is better correlating Toggle + Beeminder data. So I’m increasing my overall toggle-tracked hours goal.
I’ve reached the point where I’m hitting diminished returns with this approach. I’ve already spent 30 minutes of my [hobby-rest] time for improving [the process for] beebudget estimates today… so I’ll keep the update short.
gissue-refresh-wr-ph: Goes up by 20% after the akrasia horizon. (This is a goal I’ve not yet written about, I think. It stands for “gissue-refreshing related to popular philosophy essay writing”.)
gissue-refresh-ka-uv: Also goes up by 20% after the horizon. This is sort of a “UVI goal” related to venture theme.
venture got a… complex bump. Amounts to 10% bump at a year horizon.
I’m almost there with tying beebudget estimates back to “beeminder delta over the past d days / Toggl tracked minutes in the same period.”
Overall, my goal remains the same: reflect a gradual increase of ambition in some areas of my life in my beeminder dashboard. I’d say this is still going on track. Having the beebudget give me a clearer picture will coincide with a period in which I want to increase the ambition level.
Another update. Since last time I’ve derailed twice. run-sessions-25: $5 (Apr 10), epistemic-hygiene: $5 (Apr 16). Return the effort for an update seems pretty low still, so I’ll keep it brief.
Reducing some study goals this cycle symbolically:
cs-comp-arch, ~0.17 h/day → ~0.14 h/day
cs-prog-struc-interp: ~0.21 h/day → ~0.18 h/day
I’ll start symbolically since having some extra free days here and there may just be enough. If not, I’ll probably decrease cs-comp-arch further.
My real focus will be realizing my “venture” commitment without overloading myself. In the past 30 days, it got 12.3h. My current commitment is ~0.5h/day.
I’ve been thinking about how to move ahead with this topic.
The live question now is different: Can I push my venture output to another level?
Here’s the new playbook I’ll try.
Review venture against past 30 days
Hours logged vs. current commitment(s)
Milestone status from last post
Total load / beebudget output
Rolodex through goal configs one-at-a-time across posts (one or two per session) rather than all-at-once
Keep an eye on discretionary time budget
Set next venture milestone
Falsifiable, verifiable by next post
I’m generally feeling pretty tired these days. I’ve had another derailment for one of my study goals, so I’ll dial down my study goals a little bit more, too.
