I’m going to be setting up some goals to help with my blogging. Right now my best plan is:
a goal with the rate 1 post/month (probably pulling off Zapier / the RSS feed), to make things actually get published, along with
a goal with the rate X hours/week, to help with incremental progress
This is going to be the first thing I try to beemind where “task completed” happens infrequently but “progress” needs to happen frequently (at least if I want reasonable quality). Has anyone tried out this sort of goal setup, or have a different setup that works for them for the same type of (or exact same) objective?
would be good too.
As of today i’ve add a Draft (https://draftin.com) goal for writing/editing X number of words per day. You could consider it as well as it might be a more concrete action than hours spent.
I am beeminding time spent blogging, previously I beeminded it using the draft integration, but as it turned out there is a lot in blogging other than typing, especially when you blog on a technical topic so I ended up beeminding time, no matter what I do, so long as it is necessary to move the blog forward.
It’s a common pattern for me to have two Beeminder goals that are enforcing different aspects of the same real-world goal. Yours is an excellent example of that.
@dreev: this is a pattern to bear in mind if we implement grouping of goals.
Blogging is the only thing I beemind output rather than input for (words written rather than time spent), powered off the RSS feed with a small python script (I wrote it before the zapier integration and it’s continued working well so I’ve not bothered to change).
It works pretty well for me, and I kinda like being forced into a constant stream of output - it inspires a certain degree of desperation err creativity, and for whatever reason when I tried beeminding time spent writing I found the process annoying in a way that I haven’t other things. I suspect that may be a personal quirk.
Huh, interesting. My current blogging goal is one post on either of my two blogs (The Plover Blog or my long-neglected Stenoknight Blog) per week. I enter it manually from the goal page; so far Zapier seems like too much trouble to set up, and I get the impression that I’d have to make two separate goals for it to register both blogs? Maybe it’s because it’s such a modest goal, I don’t feel like I have to do word counting or time spent writing or whatever. It does incentivize shorter, less thoughtful posts, but I figure even a few short updates once a week is better than the huge spans of radio silence that have been dominating my blogs since I achieved my one-a-week Beeminder blogging goal back in 2012 and foolishly decided not to renew it.
Forcing out low quality posting is a feature, not a bug! Perfectionism is the greatest enemy of writing, and the more you write the better your results become and the better it is for you, even if the cost is the occasional post that is a bit sub par.
That’s a great point. I guess nothing is better than something? I just tried 7 posts in 7 days and could feel like my quality was declining towards the end, but now, when I go back to one post a week I’ll feel great. Kind of like exercising my blogging muscles I guess.
