Beeminding order from numbness

do it right now and post the screenshot, I already asked Malcom to set up a complice stakes beeminder integration so you don’t have to!

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Haha, so this feature exists because of you!

Thank you for the push, boss. Here are the proofs

(and thanks, @malcolm, for your awesome app; of course)

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Hell yeah! Excellent work. Sometimes it just takes a little push to get through analysis paralysis.

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Exactly! By the way, this setup works quite nicely.

Some info about my setup

I stake three times a day:

  1. End my morning routine (I give myself 1h30)
  2. Stop working (allows myself to fully start resting and working on admin task)
  3. Do my evening routine (at 11pm, and I usually feel sleepy afterwards, so I get to sleep earlier - if not, I take Melatonin and watch videos)

It gives the same feeling of urgency than Beeminder at the scale of a single day.
Would highly recommend! Though some days, it doesn’t work. Raw executive power is king, but this setup multiplies it.

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Hi all,

Thanks for reading my post, if you have. I’ve been struggling to stick to my therapy take-home exercises and my habit of using Beeminder to keep track of my progress. I recently got a new job, but it hasn’t helped me establish a better routine. In fact, some of my old habits have only gotten worse as the responsibilities have.

I’m looking for advice on how to set up goals in Beeminder that specifically target my mental health and address my anxiety. I struggle with anxiety before doing anything, especially before doing my therapy take-home exercises. It’s a vicious cycle that I’m finding hard to break.

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That’s a tough one. Currently I have two therapy related beeminder goals–one for reframing my thoughts, and one for texting my therapist. (Of course it depends on your therapist whether they appreciate you texting them or not.)

I’m also pretty bad at homework, though. Without going into too much detail, what are the general types of homework you’re finding it difficult to stay on top of?

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Here are some ideas for you:

  1. sleep hygiene
    • waking up early in the morning and taking a walk in the sunlight
    • use goals with deadlline for other hygiene goals so that you’re ready to sleep at 11pm: shower, teeth brushing, stop doing homework, answer all SMS, turn off phone
  2. anxiety before doing homework/work/chores: create a beeminder goal to do 30 seconds of it. You can continue or not; your choice.
  3. micro-habit to do a leisure task that is good for your mental health but difficult to do with “anxiety paralysis”: making music, knitting, working on a side-project, learning from your favorite subject

Isn’t your old setup working anymore? E.g. TaskRatchet + Complice stakes to do the important stuff?

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It didn’t stop working, I just haven’t been doing it systematically enough. Usually, I’ll just do one and kind of move on to the next thing. It’s like I have to do 10 of them a day and I’m doing 1. But there’s a lot of friction there, and there’s no way I’ve found to manage time

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Part of the issue is the fact that TaskRachet and Complice don’t have mobile notification systems, and I get burned by that frequently enough that it stops me from setting them up as much as I should

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This only kind of works for me. Like, I’ll get started, but I need another goal to keep me on it. Otherwise, I’ll stop when I get to the aspect that I was most avoidant towards.

I find it really hard to work through those things, and not just start working around something instead of toward it.

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This is killer - really bad sleep hygiene has been a huge problem. But this is due to the anxiety leading me to work on the stuff that I’ve previously put off. I’ve set up a goal to wrap-up .

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Upped my complice stakes goal from 1 to 3, set it to be due earlier in the day. It’s been pretty good for keeping me closer to how I intend to spend my time

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Just increased my goal to post here

I wish I could find a way to make progress on unstructured projects. I’ll say in my years of using beeminder, I haven’t gotten any closer to figuring that out

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Unstructured projects are hard. It usually boils down to putting in the time and trusting the process.

I found this article helpful. Task Tension: A Productivity System For Creators

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I used to use Complice’s Beeminder integration for this as well as Toggl. I felt a bit too constrained so I stopped all that, but maybe it’ll give you ideas :slight_smile:

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Those work for me to get started, but I can spend 100+ hours on a personal project and have 0 deliverables. The amount of things I want to do/dig into, and my insecurity over not having done them, expand to fill the time alotted

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My issue with complice is that everything is a bit too fresh every day. I usually just click through my reviews too, which doesn’t help. But what do you review when you haven’t gotten anything important done? Note to self: that is a bs excuse to not do it

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The thing is: coming up with a system is itself and unstructured project. What technologies to use? Any?

How can we compare two systems we haven’t implemented yet?

Whenever I have doubts about the current system, it becomes yet again another unstructured task

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Reviews are indeed hard to do; you need to put effort into it to produce a valuable outcome. The goal of reviews should be to produce a list of potential changes that you can make IMO. In my experience, this requires:

  • undistracted time
  • willingness to make changes
  • actually reading what you did every day for the last week/month/quarter (I often find out that my view of time is super distorted!)
  • gradually investing into those changes (for me, my mind underestimates the reward of “meta changes” – changing medication, starting a new beeminder goal – all the stuff that will really matter to support other goals)

So, that’s hard focused time. The kind that you would put into your craft, not the kind that you spend watching an anime episode. Beeminder can help for the “applying changes I’ve decided for myself” part.

(That’s just from my experience though; maybe others don’t need as much investment to get benefits from this practice)

Done is better than nothing!

Analysis paralysis doesn’t get you anywhere. On the other hand, a simple “reflect” goal that forces you to think hard about the mistakes you made today and potential solutions, for 10mn, and write it in a journal is already probably going to get you dramatical changes.

My point is: be pragmatic. What is the end result for review practices for you specifically? For me, it’s both tracking what I do with my life and producing life changes way sooner than I would without reviewing and journaling. With this lens, writing becomes easier. Sometimes I stray away from this and end up summing up my week; but what I really want is to “rewrite myself”

Haha, I feel this. I’ve wasted tons of customer money early in my career because of this vice.

The solution seems to be to decide to do stuff that brings value first. The book that made me change is The Lean Startup and I can find a lot of this (perhaps even better) in Shape Up that I’m currently reading. I highly recommend the latter since it gives you strategies to cope with this specific problem.

Another way to tell it: if you are producing software, deliver from day 1. Don’t build thousands of lines of codes for software with tons of features but won’t really work because it wasn’t really focused on the right stuff.

For instance, on a personnal project, I’ve decided to onboard a customer. This will allow me to focus on what’s really important and not get lost into what my mind wants to do. Of course, there is nothing wrong in loosing yourself in rabbit holes, but it must be done with moderation (I’m literally in a position where I’m on the fence about building my own Chromium version; but the pragmatism that I’ve built made me able to avoid this. On the other hand, I’m missing out on valuable experience – but when does learning stops and actually building something useful starts? For me, building something useful seemed to never start. A life of learning is the dream, but a life where you have no creation that stands by itself is not desirable either. At least for me.)

ANOTHER example is making music. Making short loops and demos is fine, but the skill set required to make an entire track is different. So you have to force yourself to put out full tracks instead of 20s samples on SoundCloud; even if they sound super bad at first because you don’t know anything about song structures

(I’m roasting myself a lot in this message, sorry to hijack your thread :sweat_smile:)

Just my 2cents! I hope that I motivated you to make a change somewhere, like you did for me a few months ago :zap:

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It’s silly because I do have a couples goal for 10 minutes or less: beetuning & journal review.

The thing is that I really want something like a 2x a week goal, and not 10 minutes a day. Can metaminding bridge this gap now?

ANOTHER example is making music. Making short loops and demos is fine, but the skill set required to make an entire track is different. So you have to force yourself to put out full tracks instead of 20s samples on SoundCloud; even if they sound super bad at first because you don’t know anything about song structures

You have no idea how much I relate to this. My life is a bunch of unfinished songs that I know, in essence, are quite good. But they are not what I imagine them to be - a song with no flaws. I mean the production is terrible because I can’t do that, but I have friends who can do the production.

I’m literally in a position where I’m on the fence about building my own Chromium version; but the pragmatism that I’ve built made me able to avoid this.

That’s awesome that you’ve gotten there. I know I can get there too. I know after I go through it enough times, I’ll develop that habit instead of being stuck here:

For me, building something useful seemed to never start. A life of learning is the dream, but a life where you have no creation that stands by itself is not desirable either

I know this because used to be much more reserved and socially anxious, until a bit over a year ago I went on a solo trip abroad and forced myself to stay in hostels with a bunch of people.

It was an excruciating first 3-4 days, then I noticed it getting better by the start of week 2. After that I stopped thinking about it all.

Much like my personal project, I knew I wasn’t, like, bad at socializing. I’ve always been well-liked by people.

There was just this sense that I was well-liked so-far, and that there was this one thing or another that was wrong, and I would come across poorly. This one thing (maybe knowing how to salsa dance or being good at a sport) could be fixed conceivably quickly, and therefore I had to fix it…but I don’t have to right now.

Thus, anxiety delayed, dopamine awarded to myself for thinking about doing something that would make my anxiety go away.

(I’m roasting myself a lot in this message, sorry to hijack your thread :sweat_smile:)

Please, don’t apologize for hijacking my thread! Your thought process is relatable to me, don’t hesitate to ramble

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