Just saw this and really liked it:
How have you adjusted or set up beeminder to help fit your level of akrasia?
For those, like me, who are on the extreme hyper end, how have you gotten beeminder to work so you’re not doing 10 things right before the deadline and getting overwhelmed?
(As a side note, “hyper akratic” makes me very happy because both those words are Greek-derived!)
I think either by having fewer goals (which, if you know me, you know is not the route I end up taking… even though I probably should) or with a cascade of goals that are due throughout the day, each with a different deadline so that they’re not all due at once, making them more doable and less overwhelming. (A.k.a. waterfalls: https://blog.beeminder.com/waterfalls/).
@dreev mentioned that they can be fussy to set up (5pm deadlines might be life-changing). My personal solution for that is to set them up over time.
I start by going to my Reminders page and setting the deadlines for all of my work goals to an hour after work is usually supposed to be finished (to make room for those crazy days), and then I go and set all the ones that I want to do before I want to be mostly-screenless for the night to another deadline, and then I set all the ones I want to do before bed to a few minutes before my usual bed time, and so on. Then, I like to have them in the order I want to do them in, so I set those due in the same block a minute apart from one another, so that the order is obvious on my dashboard. That’s it for my first run through.
After that, I just keep tweaking their deadlines as I find myself feeling annoyed that one of the blocks has deadlines that are too crowded together. I just set the earlier ones in that block a little earlier (while not making the late ones later) to space them out, until I’m happy with how it feels and each goal has plenty of time. It’s not 100% perfect, but it helps to get rid of that “clumping” phenomenon. (And personally, I think it helps me get more used to the overall routine, too.)
YMMV, though!