Starting a journal for myself to track how I slowly revamp my Beeminder usage.
I’ve always been a classically overly optimisic Beeminderer so this is an attempt to be realistic about what I can and should aim to achieve. I’m drawing on Oliver Burkeman’s “do one thing at a time” spiel to not feel so frazzled after and before work trying to finish 5 unrelated beeminder maintenance goals.
All of my goals are getting set to zero with the exception of beedialsupper (courtesy of @alys), which gets me to increase the rate of one of my goals by any amount once per week. I will continue to enter data to get a better sense of what to add back in. I am treating it as binary so that I don’t just increase them all at the same time.
I have two goals limiting the inflow and outflow of goals. One is a do-less on creating goals and another on archiving, both set at 1 per month. My thoughts here were to create a two-fold bottleneck on creating goals. If I know I can’t get archive goals that quickly, I will either not create prospective ones or instead I will set existing goals to a rate of zero so I can keep entering data and get a realistic sense of how much I can continue with that goal in the future.
My hope is that every month I can choose one theme and beemind it with the new goal I create or those that I choose to add back in. I suspect it will be something to do with sports because I have some tryouts coming up in my area’s main league, but we’ll see how this next week goes.
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Thursday 7/11/24
Derailed on my Anki maintenance goal today and just barely scraped through my reflection diary goal. Both epitomise different pain points I’ve had with Anki over the years.
- Maintenance - I know I need to do it, I wish I did it more, but I just half-ass it when forced to by Beeminder because a) it’s hard to rigorously define completion of the tasks sometimes and c) sometimes my goal design can be poor for these (eg not splitting up daily/weekly/monthly and tracking in the same goal, then forgetting it’s a weekly day not a daily day).
- Reflection - I always just end up doing a quick couple lines at the very end of the day/deadline with these. I think as much as I want to be the kind of person who reflects on trends/myself the current way I go about doing this just doesn’t work.
I thought about adding a goal for keeping to my schedule and TagTiming it but decided against it for now. Any goal that I make has to be a slow, gradual improvement over what I’m already doing and that seems like trying to get too many things right in one goal (scheduling, calendar usage, TagTime, division of priorities etc)
Hopefully as the weeks go on in this experiment I get a better understanding of what I value and what matters now, then I can make Beeminder work realistically. I’ve been shoehorning various things that I’d “liked” to do or felt like I “should” be doing into Beeminder and stressing out when I derail as opposed to enhancing/building on what I’m already doing.
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