I am a Newbee to Beeminder, and, right now, I am trying to stop a bad habit of mine: Pacing. You see, when my school or work day gets too overwhelming, or starts to feel overwhelming, I tend to pace to alleviate the stress and anxiety. The problem is that I tend to waste too much time pacing when I should be working. So, as per my question, which goal type should I use to stop this habit? I would prefer a goal type in which I can reduce my amount of pacing sessions in increments, but that’s just me. Any suggestions?
Fascinating! Are you sure it’s a bad habit? For me pacing correlates strongly with Serious Thinking. (In fact, I’m now thinking about how I could beemind more of it.)
Even without questioning your premise, I feel like the pacing would just be one manifestation of work-avoidance and that you’d be better off beeminding more work.
I guess that was still questioning your premise! If you really wanted to beemind less pacing, is it possible to have a Fitbit or other step counter that you only wear when you’re supposed to be working? (Then the next question is whether we make it easy to beemind steps as a do-less goal, since you’re the first person to ever propose a use case for that! :))
I have successfully beeminded things like “don’t pick your cuticles” or
"don’t swear". The way I did it was a do less goal, set up extremely
generously at the beginning, like “50 times a week” as my initial rate, and
then I beeminded 1 each time I caught myself picking/swearing. I used an
Ablet, which is a knitting row-counting bracelet thing but it lets you save
a count on your wrist without having to pick up your phone. If I were
doing one today, I’d use a Life Counter Ring. http://www.critsuccess.com/index.php/lcr-counter-ring.html
The key to my success was to adjust my rate every week, and use
retroratchet to reduce my safety buffer.