@strickvl, thanks for sharing! This is a really helpful way of thinking about things. In retrospect, a lot of my journey with beeminder can be seen as trying to converge on the right balance between lion and ladybird.
@dreev, I actually hate the idea of using Beeminder as a nannybot that tells me what to do every minute (though as @adamwolf says, it is definitely interesting seeing the many different ways people use Beeminder, and there’s obviously no one “right” way). Maybe I’m just misunderstanding what you have in mind, but for me, (1) my schedule is too variable to be able to set up daily “waterfalls” that actually work consistently, and more importantly (2) it seems to remove the possibility of serendipity and making space for others. For example, if one of my (life, not necessarily beeminder) goals is to be a good mentor to my students, then sometimes that means I need to drop what I was planning to do for the next hour and talk to a student about a crisis. I cannot make a Beeminder goal to “spend more time being a good mentor” (well, sure, there are some aspects of it that I could beemind). And when something like that comes up I want the flexibility to be able to respond, without having to think “is it worth $90 for me to talk to this student right now”.
Maybe the answer is that I should try to keep all my goals blue or green to allow me that flexibility — and I do indeed try to do that to some extent. But then beeminder isn’t really functioning as a minute-by-minute nannybot anymore.