Hello, fellow Beemindees. I’ve been getting back into using Beeminder a lot. I have goals for catching up with my backlog of advance copies of books from Netgalley, my backlog of bought and unread books, my dissertation reading and writing reviews for my blog. Not to mention my support goal for work, the goal tracking my Game of Books score, inbox zero and doing the dishes.
I cannot think of how to get my crafting into goals, though. I mean, I’m doing a crochet along, I have this gorgeous blanket to do, I have a blanket that was meant to keep me warmer this winter but which still needs two more rows and an edging, and I have a blanket I started two years ago for my sister. That’s not to mention all the amigurumi I do for my wife…
For long projects like a blanket or crocheting you could do a timer based goal. Essentially you have to knit for 5 minutes a day or a set time per week.
I know there are a couple other beeminders out there beeminding knitting and crafts. For a long time I had a time spent goal that was kind of my fun goal. Like “I get to go do craft now because Beeminder says I have to.” I think I quit that one at some point because the burden of manual data entry – sometimes I would forget to count time, since it was my fun activity, and then later an eep day would come up and I’d know I had done something but have no idea how much… it eventually got frustrating.
Right now my major problem with crafting is starting things and never finishing them, so I’ve got a very low rate / long term goal to finish things, with 1 finished object due per month. I can enter partially finished objects, but I can’t jump around once I enter something. So I estimate this dress I’m sewing is 80% finished, and enter a 0.8, then I’m committed to finishing it (or frogging it) before I can start counting something else… I’ve only made it through a few months, but it seems to be going well so far!
I was thinking about a UFO goal (unfinished objects), but I don’t actually have that many. It’s more unstarted projects, ahaha. It might have to be a time based one, but it’s often not that much in my control with various work things and university things and travelling… And stitch numbers really depend on the type of project and can be hard to keep track of anyway…
Maybe the best thing to do would be to make one with a low goal and see how it goes.
I’ve tried it a few different ways - beeminding completed projects and beeminding time, and I have ended up going with the time model. I have my goal set to 15 hours per week, and I use pomodoros to track time (I set up a IFTTT button I hit every time I finish a stitching pom). Stitching is part of my job, so it’s not something I can not do - idk if my method would be too work-like for someone crafting for fun lol
Update: I made a goal of doing 30 minutes a day. The effect so far has been that I have picked up my crafts more often, but I’ve generally done so in great big marathons to catch up to my goal rather than consistently doing it every day. I’m not sure yet whether I approve of this…
Also, the blanket I mentioned for the crochet along is going sloooowly because apparently I cannot count my stitches even when I’m trying REALLY HARD to count my stitches. Sigh. At least the crafting goal is giving me a sense of achievement even when I crocheted only three rows in a day and then had to frog them all.
I often combine my minutes goals with days goals, to help mediate the marathon stretches.
I do this by setting up another goal, and using ifttt to add 1 to the goal every datapoint I add to the first goal. There’s a potential weasel here, where you can add a bunch of 1 minute datapoints to the source goal and get a bunch on your days goal. You can either 1) not be a weasel and do it manually or 2) if you are a premium users you can set the goal as custom, and set aggday to nonzero.
I am kinda in love with this, as you’ll see if you search my forum activity across the forums.
I have a three times a week goal for crafting. It ensures I sit down and do something that’s just purely for my enjoyment without feeling guilty about it. I always leave myself a comment on what I was doing which is fun to look back over. Sometimes I cheat it and write something that isn’t strictly crafting but was still me time so I don’t really think that’s cheating. I find there are times I get involved in a project and enter data every day for a while, but then I get busy and do nothing for weeks and beeminder gently reminds me to go and look out my knitting basket. Works really well.
I have used specific goals to finish projects in the past. I see your two year blanket and raise you the one that was finished eleven years after I started and only because I set myself a time based goal to work on it for a small amount of time each day (about 10 mins iirc) until it was done. That also worked well in a ‘get ahead of yourself but don’t get behind’ way.
Not Beeminder as such, though I think it could be turned into a Beeminder goal. I have been thinking recently about theme days of the week (errand day, family day etc) and chose to create Weaving In Wednesday, to get myself to grab the most nearly finished thing and work on that. I finished a blanket that I actually knitted, bound off and blocked last year and finally gave it to my friend!
But then I forgot (avoided) to do it again the next week. However I still feel I am onto something
…ok, actually I think @k1rsty’s “n times per week” method might actually work for me and scrapbooking. I’ve tried different ways to beemind it in the past, and they were either too much overhead or ended up making my “fun” time feel like work, which was counterproductive. But having a “touch my scrapbook n times a week” setup means that if I really DON’T have time, I can just sort a few photos and count it as done; if I do actually have time, though, it will “gently remind me” to look at it! Thanks
I find that overcoming the inertia of moving from doing nothing to ‘just get it out and have a look at it’ is often all I really need to get going; if I set the bar too high and try to get myself to work on things (even leisure activities) for too long then I end up saying ‘nah, just pay up’ and beeminder ends up being counter-productive for me.
Also the n times a week thing is pretty easy to keep track of, even when I forget to enter the data it’s not too hard to remember that I had the sewing machine out last weekend and did some knitting while watching something on tv another day so I can fill in the back data when I get 'eeep’d at.
or 2) if you are a premium users you can set the goal as custom, and set aggday to nonzero.
