Dialling down all my goals to stop myself stressing out over them seemed like a good idea but now I am stressed out because I’m not getting stuff done. That was predictable wasn’t it?
New goals
I’ve just added myself a ratechanges goal to make a rate change on at least one of my beeminder goals at least twice a week. This is directly inspired by @alys’s Overwhelmed or In Control? advent post as my current status is veering wildly between the two. I think long term rate changes and trying to keep my goals as green as I can are, in general, much better than putting breaks in goals which are fine when they are planned for a reason like “being on holiday” but not great when things actually need doing. I’ve made the goal just “rate changes” so that I can nudge goals to be harder or easier as I feel is needed.
Finished goals
A craft goal I set up to be done with a sashiko project by Christmas reached target and the project is completed. Always nice to actually tick something off as done.
Derailments
One goal derailed before it reached the point where I’d made it easier for December. It was still at it’s initial $0 pledge and I’m quite happy with that.
Changes
I’m now tracking urgency_load just to see what happens with it and how it correlates to how I feel. I decided the sensible place to put the data was in with lots of other stats about my life that I store in Exist so I wrote a script to store the maximum and minimum levels of the urgency_load each day. So far I haven’t got enough data in there for Exist to come up with any correlations but I’m definitely feeling like a low urgency_load isn’t as good as I thought it might be because it’s been created too artificially. With all my goals in the green I’m just not getting things done! I wanted to give my brain a break but apparently my brain is not sure what to do with this space and is just jumping around driving me nuts.
And I’ll probably have run out of breaktime on my goals by the time it’s actually Christmas and I have things to do that require an actual break. I’m not dialling any goals any further down now and happy to take derailments. I feel like I’m forgetting there’s a “just pay the pledge” safety valve on all the goals.