Do I want to pay a $10 Beeminder penalty to derail on my Sugar goal and take advantage of the free brownies, cookies, pastries, etc provided by the all-day conference I’m working at today?
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Answer: Yyyyyyyyep.
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I think it’s time for another goal shakeup. Beeminder has been working really well for me lately, I have to say. I’ve got a recurring task in Amazing Marvin to enter all red goals as tasks, and that’s helped me to focus on addressing Beemergencies earlier in the day. Updating my “Delivery” goal to include not just restaurant and delivery food but also food or coffee I buy while at work (though I’ve given myself a loophole not to count food purchased at a drugstore or grocery store) has definitely enforced more compliance and discipline than I’ve ever managed before. My “Mealprep” goal has been going pretty well, though I’m still struggling to do a week’s worth of prep proactively rather than doing little piddly catch-up tasks throughout the week. I’m possibly most proud of my “Refreshes” goal, which has drastically cut down on my Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook/Feedly churn habit. I went from a buffer of 20 refreshes before derailing to my current level of about 66, which means there have been quite a few days when I didn’t use up my whole 7-refreshes-per-day allotment. I feel good about that.
But what I’ve really been falling behind on is budgeting time to work on things that aren’t Must Get Done Today tasks. I’ve got a number of long-term projects that have just been falling by the wayside because I feel overwhelmed enough lately that when I put out my daily fires I just want to shut the to-do list and kill time doing something brainless instead of tackling anything that’s complex, incremental, and longterm. So I think I’m gonna have to make an overarching metagoal called Work on a Project.
Current projects include:
- The talk I’m going to give at an online conference in February
- The CEUs I need to complete for my certification by January
- Some piecework I have from a client with a deadline in December
- The industry information website I want to build, ideally by February
- Long-term household stuff like passports, wills, fixing broken stuff, deep cleaning, etc
- Editing the NaNo novel I wrote in 2016
- Making a photobook of Nongestational Parents and their Kids to print out for my kid
I feel like there are more projects burbling on the backburner as well, but those are all that come to mind at the moment. So I need to pick a goal to retire so I can free up space for a Work on a Project goal. Hm. I’m kind of tempted to roll “meals” and “mealplanning” together by retiring meals and adding 7 more required points per week to mealplanning. Yeah, I think that’s what I’m gonna do. Wish me luck!
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Holy dang it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. I’ve been doing most of my productivity reflection stuff in my YNAB Journal, since I’ve got a Beeminder goal to post to it every few days. But I recently wrote a short love letter to the person who’s contributed the most to my productivity over the past few months, Miracle Forest on YouTube (I’m a Patreon supporter, I love her work so much), and I thought I’d post it here, since I was curious what background sounds/music/videos other people use to enhance their productivity while working:
I recently transcribed 8 hours of audio over the course of a few days, always using your videos to help keep me focused. I’ve never found anything that’s worked as well to keep the boredom and distraction at bay while working! The ones that helped the most were Home Office, Tokyo Rooftop, Jazz Club, Robot Bartender, Night in a Treehouse, Spring Garden, and Breakfast in Bed, though I honestly love them all so much. Fire sounds and pouring fizzy liquid sounds help me the most, though I also love bird sounds, page turning, science fictional beep-boops, and all other water/liquid sounds. In terms of future videos, I’d love something with a brick wall. Maybe an urban roof garden? Also, please never stop making it start raining partway through your videos! It’s my FAVORITE moment every time!!!
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Though while I’m at it, here are updates on the projects I last posted about last November (!!!)
- The talk I’m going to give at an online conference in February
Done and it went really well, though I still have to caption it and upload the captioned video to YouTube. A friend even transcribed it for me, so there’s so little I need to do besides autotime it and tweak the autotimings, but it’s just been really backburner. Also I gave a spinoff version of this talk to a different audience which was live captioned by… Forgive me, a captioner whose work was not quite where I’d hoped it would be. So I’m planning to live caption it myself and replace the original captions with a video of my own live captions, juxtaposed with autocaptions, to show the true difference between the two. But that sounds like such a pain, it’s even farther on the back burner than the other video. Glarghle.
* The CEUs I need to complete for my certification by January
Expensive and annoying, but I did eventually get them done!
* Some piecework I have from a client with a deadline in December
Done, along with two other similar batches from the same client, the most recent one finished just this weekend. These are hard to find time for, but satisfying and lucrative to do.
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The industry information website I want to build, ideally by February
Virtually zero progress on this one, which is not great. I’ve got a meeting with a web designer on Friday with whom I’ve worked out a sort of in-kind service trade agreement, but I’ve got to get my stuff together before he can do much to help me; so far it’s been me mostly offering services to him for his work, because I haven’t done enough on my end to give him something to get started on for mine. -
Long-term household stuff like passports, wills, fixing broken stuff, deep cleaning, etc
Eep. Virtually nothing done on this. Most pressing is getting RealIDs for all of us so we can fly when the rules change next year. But passports would also be an extremely good idea. And wills. Argh, wills. I’m ostriching hardcore on all of these, but I need to bust myself out of that pronto. -
Editing the NaNo novel I wrote in 2016
No progress. Not a high priority, alas.
* Making a photobook of Nongestational Parents and their Kids to print out for my kid
I did this and it’s great! So satisfying and we both love flipping through it together.
Not the most shining track record, but oh well. Onward and upward.
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In the continuing quest to be more economical (I’ve been really bad with buying lunch out for me and the kid lately), I made a goal that will require me to check the budget on my phone’s YNAB app several times a week before purchases. So far I’m still in the one-week yellow brick road period, but it’ll get real soon.
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Just did a tune-up of all 12 goals. Mostly stepping down pledge amounts from $10 to $5, but also decreasing mercy days from an average of 3 to an average of 1. I marked my Goodreads autogoal for archiving, and when it goes away I’m going to just have a manual “did I read any amount of an actual book (ebook or paper) today?” goal. I had one of those a few years back and it did wonders for my mental health. It turns out that logging finished books isn’t incremental enough, and I’ve been reading much less since I switched over. I also unsubscribed from a bunch of people on Twitter and will do the same with Tumblr and Feedly soon. A busy few weeks has resulted in a big backlog of “refreshes” points, but I don’t want to retroratchet them, because I use them as a proxy for how in my phone I’ve been. I’m just gonna try to keep them moving in the right direction.
I’ve stepped up my “check the budget ideally before/during purchasing something, but at the very least before importing the relevant transaction into YNAB” goal to 7 days a week, with a no mercy derail and a pretty strict autoratchet. I’m hoping that’ll help me to keep my new wamzaps (Zapier autorecording any time I overspend in a category) goal from derailing. I’m not working much from now until the last week of this month, so I’ve got to be a little careful with my money. To that end, I’ve also changed my mealplanning goal, which used to accept a handful of too-nebulous inputs (a point for working on my weekly mealplanning project in Marvin, a point for recording what we were gonna have for dinner on PlanToEat) and which is now just going to be a straight-up ratio of meals in versus meals out. I’m starting with a very easy ratio and intend to increase the steepness as I go.
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