Derailments
- my pomodoro goal derailed; nothing bad I’d just lost momentum and buffer whilst moving house.
- my instagram goal derailed; head scratching over this one probably coming later in this post
New Goals
- new month’s resolution for May is a readinghour goal intended to stop my books goal derailing. so far it’s working as intended!
Comments
I went from having no thoughts about Beeminder in my last post to having all the thoughts. I’ve been thinking a lot of my goals aren’t very coherent for a while but not doing anything about it. I’ll spare you the all the thoughts I had but some major ones were:
- maybe a lot of my goals are a Beemindery version of the sunk cost fallacy? I said I’d do this thing a long time ago and therefore I am still doing it, even though it long since stopped making sense to do so.
- the way I had goals tagged as work/home/health etc was obvious but also meaningless
- what the hell am I trying to do here anyway?
The train of thought ended up - more or less - with this chart:
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My goals started to make sense as a whole when I put them into three categories
- stuff I enjoy and want to do more of (even if it’s work)
- stuff I don’t really want to do, admin basically, but don’t want to forget
- stuff that somehow supports improving and getting better (the woolliest classification of the three)
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But I could also split them into
- long term goals that I want to keep doing maybe forever,
- short term goals. These are supposed to finish someday and classifying them like this helps me see what has overstayed it’s usefulness.
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Or there’s a third way
- Some goals are there to remind me (with a sting!) to do things
- Other goals were just tracking stuff, mostly because autodata makes it easy to do that.
- (and then I don’t have a category name for the ones that aren’t really either of those)
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And I really like the pattern where some of my goals make trees and several smaller, often short term, goals feed into a bigger, long term goal.
I did all that a couple of weeks ago and this morning I decided to go through and archive a lot of the goals I thought were just cruft in the system without looking back at the chart before I picked the goals. I’ve crossed those out on the chart (along with a couple I’d archived in the meantime). It was pretty much all the tracking goals that got culled. I don’t think these belong in Beeminder. I’m not holding myself to any commitment with them, just using Beeminder as a handy place to see progress. A lot of them were autodata - if they’d been manual data I’d have got bored with entering it long ago. I feel like I need a different system to keep tabs on some of these metrics but I don’t think Beeminder is the right place.
And now I feel like I have an idea what I’m actually trying to do with Beeminder and can expand again. Some things I might do soon:
- add a couple of extra goals for reading that support the books goal (eg to read more non-fiction)
- add some more goals to the improve category of goals to balance wanting to do a hundred different hobbies without feeling overwhelmed by all of them
- figure out what a consolidated improve goal would look like