Newbie here. I need to do a couple of tax returns, for different countries, by different deadlines. Which I keep putting off. They’re a once a year thing. How can I best beemind these?
I’d make an individual ‘do more’ goal for each one each year.
You can then set the goal value to either 100 (and do percentwise beeminding) or an estimate for the number of hours you think it is going to take.
Set the goal date to a couple of weeks before the government deadline in case your estimates were off.
Thanks for reminding me I need to set one of these up!
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The default graphs will encourage you to make steady progress towards a goal. If you’d prefer, say, to do everything in the 6 weeks before the deadline, then you could also use take a break to flatten the road for the 10½ months that you don’t need to do anything. (Just remember that your slope in the 6 weeks that count has to be steep enough to get you to 100%.)
I’ve tried a variety of things over the years to beemind preparing for conferences. (Which are similar in that they also have a real-world imposed deadline with real-world consequences.) Here are some ideas:
- time, either manually entered or automated with RescueTime or TagTime
- number of slides/pages completed and/or started
- days of doing ‘something’ toward the goal
- increasing slopes — start shallow, then schedule increases as the deadline approaches
The increasing slope model might be useful, like a monthly check to see whether there’s anything to do before month-end for any of your finances.
@insti’s percentage idea has the singular benefit of being able to mark a goal as ‘done’ at any point, without having to wait a week. Equally, you can email support to tell us that you’ve filed your return and we can adjust the goal straight away.
What you don’t want to do is to set a slope of 1/year and get reminded the day before its due! Make sure there’s enough time for little-and-often progress so that a derailment doesn’t screw you up completely. I usually tick the no mercy derail setting, because getting a flat week isn’t helpful for deadline-driven goals.
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Thank you, but how do I set the goal frequency to yearly? I’m looking at https://www.beeminder.com/start# and all I see how is much per week.
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The return will really only take an hour to do, unless I can’t find a key paper. I just procrastinate about them a lot.
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You have to start it with a weekly number and then you can change it (on the advanced settings tab) after you’ve started the goal.
(or manually divide the yearly number by 52)
#featurerequest
[UPDATE: @philip edited this to indicate where this can be changed…]
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Ah, found it. Thanks!
These are the sorts of things for which I wish I could use GTBee!
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Actually, that’s not a bad idea. GTBee lets you ascribe a penalty to completing individual tasks.
Unless Tracy is better than I am at doing what Beeminder tells her that her past-self thought was best, she’ll need to account for the possibility of a couple of derails occurring before the tax deadline.
An alternative approach is to sign up (temporarily if needs must) to our Beemium plan and jump to a suitably scary pledge amount straight away.
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For something like this, I’d probably use a “Must Do Task” (
http://blog.beeminder.com/mustdo/ ) goal.
You don’t have to have a 1/day rate. You could do a 1/month with a 30-day
"max safe days" limit, to make sure the time for this one doesn’t come and
go because you’ve built up a safety buffer (In the fine print, you could
specify that you can’t get credit for any other task in March until the
taxes are done, for example). You could even pick a task for each month
until then (list them in order of the months in which they should be done
in the fine print) and do each of them as they come up in their own turn.
Or, instead of using the safety buffer, you could allow yourself to finish
the next one as early as you’d like, but not to get credit for later ones
if you haven’t finished those scheduled earlier first. That way you get to
your tax goal in time, and you get a number of other 1-off or once-per-year
things done between now and then.
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My issue with mustdo is that you need to set a rate that kinda sorta reflects the frequency at which you create mustdo tasks. Sometimes I would like to be bursty and create a large number that need doing soon, and other times I can go for months and months without one. I currently just use calendar reminders for this, but I feel like GTBee would be better.
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What about conjunctions of tasks? I’ll sometimes make my mustdo be something like “inbox zero AND epsilon progress on beebrain bug AND …” Or at the other extreme something like “answer 1 email OR do something fun in the sunshine”.
I do highly recommend the “One Must-Do” system!
PS: As usual I may move this thread to the Akrasia category if it starts to get potentially overwhelming for newbees but I think I’ll make sure to add at least an FAQ item somewhere first. This was a great topic to bring up! Thanks @tracy_reader!
Or you can use the “safe days” feature.
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I’m a bit lost, why would I assign a penalty for completing tasks?
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Sorry for the unclarity. Our GTBee app lets you ascribe a penalty for failing to complete individual tasks by a deadline. Notably, I think you can immediately set a high penalty for failing to complete the task, in contrast to Beeminder which by default encourages you to climb the pledge schedule with at least a week inbetween each derailment.
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Thank you. I was wondering if it was some complicated mind hack.