Everyday’s a new year with Beeminder, and though I think the first of the year in the dead of winter is a terrible time to make sudden major changes it seems that I think January’s still a good time for a stack of new goals.
Changes
I changed my pomodoro goal up so that I could send datapoints to it straight from where I create them in Obsidian. (Actually technically since the old goal was an odometer and the new one is not I made a new pomodoro goal and set it up with similar settings/safety buffer to the old one and then archived the old one.) And that workflow also meant I could send datapoints to other goals just by using a hashtag while I was at it. It’s really tempting to add a load of goals for different projects and I’ve been trying not to do too much new stuff at once so I’ve only linked it up with a couple of new goals so far.
I think the only goal I’ve removed is my taskratchetcheck one. I was finding taskratchet to be one too many pieces in my todo system at the moment, and not well enough linked into the other bits.
New goals
- nocto this was an old goal I had for blog posts, I’ve pulled it out of the archive and repurposed it to count pomodoros working on my blog, which removes the pressure to actually publish stuff but makes it more likely that I will.
- workwork I’m not too sure about this one. It was inspired by @alys’s “First Things First” goal for getting down to important stuff in the morning as I have a habit of doing the easy things first and putting off the hard things as long as I can. It needs a datapoint (using the pomodoro hashtag thing from above) before 10am. One reason I’m not sure about it is that entering a datapoint after 10am would just make me super early for the next day, which I won’t do deliberately but might do accidentally - is there a way to enforce a datapoint only between 6am and 10am at all? And the other reason I’m not sure about it is that it seems that doing the big work first means I don’t get round to the little work that does still need doing. But that seems like shifting things along to where there’s a smaller problem to solve, which is probably good.
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stayfocused Something Alys said in another of her posts about using
truemeanto aggregate datapoints throughout the day made me realise there was a way to beemind sticking to a schedule by reviewing how I did on each block of my day. Rather than write an essay here I’ll make another post about that soon! - focushours A companion goal to stayfocused that logs how many hours each day are on the schedule. Made when I realised I could cheat the stayfocused goal pretty easily by making the schedule only cover very short periods of time.
- stravatime Going through all the end of year review stats that came my way and one that stood out was that I spent 314 hours of 2022 in workouts, which is 51.6 minutes/day. My aim is that at least an hour of each day on average should be exercise of some sort so I thought it’d be a good idea to beemind that and try and up it a bit for 2023. It’s currently set to 55/mins a day and I’m trying to hang on to my 7 days of safety buffer.
- exercisetime I set this one up by mistake. Stravatime was what I wanted, this one uses the exercise minutes from my Apple watch which are always more because they include all the odd bits of running up the stairs etc. I’ve left it because I thought it might be interesting to see how it correlates with stravatime.
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mindfuldays While I was messing around with setting up Apple Health linked goals I thought it’d be a good idea to beemind the number of days I do anything that ends up as mindful minutes (using the
nonzeroaggregation setting). Meditation is the aim but reading with the Forest app and even just doing the Breathe thing with my watch also add minutes that would count. They are things I forget about until I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed and doing them regularly is definitely a good idea but one that I forget about. Set up with a stupidly low bar of twice a week and I’m already edgeskating it.