After my first month of Beeminder

Life
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I passed a month a few days ago, I was just looking at some stats:

  • Recently had my most productive week at my job in over 4 months – and so consistently productive too – usually I used to have 3 good days and then the other 2 were duds, now it’s consistently 5 solid days most weeks, and often get 1-2 solid weekend days too

  • Home / family life has improved, looks like I’m doing about 50 - 60% more in that sphere (more chores, done sooner, better communication across all personal relationships)

  • Pretty consistent control of various vices – it really helps me stick to moderation. It’s funny I was out over the weekend and a friend asked if I wanted to go smoke with the group and I was just like “Nah I can’t do it today because of that little bee chart thing I showed you the other day” and he was like “Oh I totally get it”. Also been using RescueTime to good effect for various sites.

I keep thinking “it’s gonna break” or something, I probably still need to give it a good 6-9 months to be sure.

But the consistency, the confidence, the “knowing when enough is enough” is just so incredible.

And I love how you can just be like “I kinda feel like I need to be doing more of X” and then tweak your autodialer, and then magically you just start doing more of X.

The Akrasia horizon really allows me to listen to my emotions more and make future decisions in-the-moment, without my “over-reactiveness” causing havoc (because it takes 7 days to kick in, plenty of time to keep adjusting to the right level of response).

I feel like a completely different person. It’s crazy.

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To me it is relatable that all of the things you do/do not because of beeminder just have such a big impact on your life. Even if it is just doing a thing for a few minutes. It is so cool to hear that your personal life also has really improved. Do you mind sharing some goal advice for this? Is it just spending more time with your family or blocking time for some chores everyday? I think this is something that could really help me - also do you mind elaborating on how you combine beeminder with friends? - I really struggle with that because I prioritize meet ups with friends over beeminder even though a goal is due at that time. And I also struggle with telling family/friends about beeminder because they might think I am a little bit weird. But yeah this shouldn’t be a problem in good friendships - I know :sweat_smile:. I am a little bit worried that certain people will not have a good impact on me and I really hope that I can somehow create boundaries for that to prioritize my beeminder goals?
I believe a profound impact really comes from blocking all websites and distractions as they are probably you’re worst enemy. So glad that you have picked up Rescue time for that - I am not sure at the moment if it is worth it for me as I paid for Rize - which doesn’t have an API yet but I still paid for it :(. I like about RescueTime that you can also block subdomains which I do with leechblock at the moment because I still need to use youtube for specific fields. But RescueTime could really manage my time for example for not spending so much time on this forum which I didn’t block with leechblock but could be really great for not spending too much time on it.

My first month so far:
With Beeminder you just realise that you should do the thing now - I think I need to pick up the autodialer as well to improve in things maybe and do more of it. But I don’t know if it will make you better at certain things over time?. For daily habits is a consistent minimum really great. There will be days when it is difficult to find time for something and 10 minutes minimum is really great for these days.

  • My biggest issue at the moment is that I am not able to plan my week 7 days ahead. Sometimes an appointment or a meet up with people happens in less days. It would be maybe great to reduce the days. But this is also just because I have beeminder goals that I do every day and which get auto-ratcheted everytime. Maybe I need to change that because I think the beeminder team will not change the 7 days. But those daily habits will maybe lead to not “breaking” beeminder someday or they will do the opposite - because yeah my way is not how beeminder should work who knows? But I feel like I am procrastinating soo much still that it is really helpful to have a specific timeline at every day. Otherwise I have the problem to “cram” all my goals in the last minutes. There will be for sure days that I will not have time for my goals. So pls maybe add the option to set breaks maybe a few days in advanced. Archiving can still be 7 days and also every other change to the goal. But I really need a decrease in days for setting up breaks to maybe 2/3.
    Right now I am just lying to myself by entering data when I have not done specific tasks :sob:
  • Also I am not able to set up some goals because how much I struggle with some settings and things not working. It would be just amazing if you have your setup that works now. But I need some time for the technological testing. But when it is done it will be amazing for sure to have your goals that stick as a basis and then add some goals for specific periods.
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Do you mind sharing some goal advice for this? Is it just spending more time with your family or blocking time for some chores everyday?

For sure! So for me I use Intend.do (formerly Complice) for all of my task management – my work has Jira / project management tools, but in terms of how I personally process them, it’s all Intend.

So I’ll have one goal for my day job (and occasionally for certain sub-projects, but usually it’s all in one big track), one goal for my personal life, and one for side-projects. 3 main goals.

That’s been working for me for a long time. The main trick is that it doesn’t allow you to plan too far ahead, so it’s always fresh. (It also has a “daily / weekly / monthly review” system that I personally don’t use, in favor of physical journaling)

Beeminder integrates with Intend, so all of my goal data goes into Beeminder.

So like 30 tasks for my day job / day, 15 for my personal life, 10 for my personal projects or gaming, etc. You can also do it based on minutes spent – I’m pretty good about using the timers in Intend and have good time tracking, but in practice the tasks / day is enough.

So the way I do more chores is just raise my “personal / home life” target – for me using Autodialer I did #autodialAdd=2 which then added 2 tasks to my 30 day average, until I gradually started doing like XX% more than I was doing before.

In general though I set #autodialTimes=0.8 – so Beeminder only expects me to do 80% of my average – that way if I’m too tired or less motivated or for any reason can’t hit 100%, I’m not stressed out, and it will gradually shift down to meet my actual ability.

And it means that on average I will usually beat my plan, which always feels good.

At a certain point when the target gets high enough I naturally start adding chores / other home tasks, because I need something else to fill the bucket and those things would make life better.

do you mind elaborating on how you combine beeminder with friends? - I really struggle with that because I prioritize meet ups with friends over beeminder even though a goal is due at that time. And I also struggle with telling family/friends about beeminder because they might think I am a little bit weird. But yeah this shouldn’t be a problem in good friendships

All my good friends have seen or heard about Beeminder at some point. I explained how much it helps me, so they’re pretty supportive.

But also yeah – having good friends is definitely part of it, or friends who are smart or understanding & trying to improve themselves too.

I believe a profound impact really comes from blocking all websites and distractions as they are probably you’re worst enemy.

Yeah it’s crazy how much time it’s possible to lose. I’ve tried a bunch of different apps on mobile before finding something that works for me (Unpluq + LockMeOut on Android), not sure if RescueTime + Beeminder will be enough for my Mac but so far so good.

My biggest issue at the moment is that I am not able to plan my week 7 days ahead.

To be honest I rarely add individual tasks for the future, more I just throw them in my big goal buckets and work off of those.

Took me a long time to stop planning though, I used to be ridiculous about it, but it just doesn’t work for me personally.

Intend has a really good philosophy Intend philosophy & paradigm

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wow thank you so much. this is so interesting. I will definitely get some inspiration from that. Intend seems to be really good and I love the philosophy. I will use it. I will also try the autodialer.
For distractions I can really just advise to use leechblock on chrome. just add *.com and google.com to the blocklist and you will never be able to enter a site. I got rid of discord app and etc. and now only enter specific discord channels I want on my browser with leechblock. You never go down rabbit holes again etc. because the process of whitelisting a new url just takes so much time and energy. You can enter a site to show when block occurs. I entered my beeminder dashboard :joy: . Sometimes a distraction when I look for new goals and still need a solution for that :joy: . With other distraction blockers I lack the feature to watch youtube videos that are good while blocking every other part on youtube that is bad for me. It is of course helpful before you start to unterstand how the url of a google/youtube etc. search is mate but this is learning by doing

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Interested in this also, I’ll look into Intend.

I’ve never been too keen of managing a task list and having a beeminder goal to tick off X tasks a day or similar. Not all tasks are created equal. 1 big task is better than 5 tiny ones and I’d worry I’d break things down into too small chunks just so that I’d have tasks to tick off.

I’ve also never really understood how to use beeminder to do less of bad things. My goals are all Do More, getting me to spend time on things that I want to do a little more of. Your example of not smoking, how do you track that you /didnt/ smoke? Are you just adding a +1 to a “Didnt smoke today” goal?

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I’ve never been too keen of managing a task list and having a beeminder goal to tick off X tasks a day or similar. Not all tasks are created equal. 1 big task is better than 5 tiny ones and I’d worry I’d break things down into too small chunks just so that I’d have tasks to tick off.

For what it’s worth it also supports built-in time-tracking and pomodoro tracking. Intend actually has continuous pomodoros so you can just keep it running and then assign them later if you don’t want to deal with the timers in the moment.

If tasks every breaks down for me I will probably switch to that since I do the time tracking all the time anyways.

But so far I’ve find the task # works fine. Partially because I am a freak about granularity, but also because I’m more trying to make sure I keep a certain pace – and after a while I figured it all averages out and you tend to behave consistently.

Like you can’t keep making tasks more granular past a certain point, so you will go up to that point and then not further, then the number becomes stable and meaningful.

And after a while I found I made fewer in some cases where it was inconvenient, because after you’ve got used to it you don’t care as much about constantly hitting new highs. But just me.

I’ve also never really understood how to use beeminder to do less of bad things. My goals are all Do More, getting me to spend time on things that I want to do a little more of. Your example of not smoking, how do you track that you /didnt/ smoke? Are you just adding a +1 to a “Didnt smoke today” goal?

Yeah I have 2, one for last night, and one at 4 PM. Works really well for me for a bunch of things. I saw it on some blog or article on their site.

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I’ve seen people just frame this the other way: “+1 for a smoke-free day” or “+1 for a sugar-free day, yay me!” and suchlike. Thinking about it, this works best for me, too, when I’ve had the need for this type of goal.

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