I explicitly use Beeminder to help me balance the different parts of my life the way I want to when I’m thinking about them, not when I’m all engrossed in one of them.
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I agree with you on this to some extent. I try very much to start with reasonable / small goals, but I guess once I’ve started a goal, it’s easy to start tweaking and dialling the roads to a rate that I wouldn’t normally consider. Part of the problem is that it’s sometimes hard to see the bees for the trees, or it’s hard to calculate what other BM goals will be going on at point X or Y in the future, so planning how multiple goals interact takes a bit of thought.
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That’s a good idea to deal with a variable, unpredictable daily routine. However, I feel that there is one advantage of using the bank method with higher beeminder rates over the minimum rates method that allows for a weekly task flexibility. There will be a flexible motivation to settle down the negative values in the bank in the future. And on top of that, you do not have the side effect of relaxing with a minimum rate .
Basically the bank method will allow to push you with a relatively higher rate to do a better job in your task, but at the same time will give room for flexibility when you need it. Moreover, what you have borrowed from the bank, will still be counted in a negative balance and will bug you, until you can restore it to 0 but in a very flexible way at any day in the future. Also tracking what had been done is simply the final value in the beeminder graph + the bank value (whether it is positive or negative).
In sum, you got the tracking, the flexibility and the pushing effect of a higher rate.
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I don’t think that I could make the bank method work in my situation, but I find it intriguing.
For me, I have no planned schedule for how long I will spend on each task on a given day. So, I can’t figure out how I would determine what counts as extra time spent, or which task I would deduct from to account for that extra. I suppose I could call the amount of unnecessary buffer I add to my beeminder goal extra, but in some cases huge buffers are a necessity for me because I work in chunky time and figuring out what is above and beyond for each goal would get onerous. And that doesn’t solve the problem of deciding which task should get the negative time.
If I find that I need to give myself an extra push to do more of something I’ll dial up the rate on that task and sometimes balance it out with decreasing the rate on something else. But I can get frustrated that I have to wait a week for the higher rate to take effect if what I need is a push right now. In that case, having a negative balance in a bank of some kind would be a very useful motivator.
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Agreed! I spend a kind of embarrassing amount of time figuring out how to adjust my goals and rates. One thing that has helped me is to (mostly) stick to a rule that I can’t increase more than one goal rate per week, and if I’m making a significant increase I need to also decrease a goal somewhere. Which is very helpful with figuring out priorities! (i.e. what am I willing to do less of in order to do more of this?)
And using the Beeminder calendar from this thread was helpful. I actually ended up getting overwhelmed with having all my goals on my calendar, so I started using IFTTT to add an event to my calendar when specific goals whose deadlines are most important are approaching, and that has worked really well for me.
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I’m pretty sure that if you increase the rate of the road and then retroratchet the new rate will take effect immediately. Unfortunately, it won’t let you downdial another goal to compensate.
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The effect you described exists but the new rate is only taking effect sooner by the number of days by which you retroratchet. (in akrasia horizon minus the number of days by which the buffer was cut)
However, if it is only possible to maintain some buffer (if at all the person is motivated to do something if it is not an emergency day), if the buffer is more than the akrasia horizon, in a way the new rate takes effect immediately (in terms of the numbers beeminder tells us we need to do to push the goal one day further). I try to keep all my goals at 10+ days, that is, I consider “10” to be the emergency day. This removes some of the motivating stinginess… But in terms of applying the rate immediately, this is most useful.
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I have a beeminder goal to do a daily plan each workday and another one to “do 3 things” each working day from that plan.
For me, these combine to keep me working, while also giving a lot of flexibility as to what I do.
I have a bunch of specific daily goals too, but they’re all pretty brief (well, as long as I keep on top of the inbox zero one).
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Thank you for your Habitica suggestion, btw. I’ve reorganised everything now with an emphasis on Habitica rather than on BM. It’s only been a week but it feels less pressure. Do you use the Habitica-BM integration? I’m not sure I need it…
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Thanks for the post, much of it does resonate with me.
I’m just coming out of a goal collapse. Putting it in these terms I tried very hard to avoid the lion approach, but slowly added more goals and eventually added one that it turned out I didn’t really want to do and it wound up being toxic to the entire system.
Having just one goal that I was falling behind on and started to feel like it was hanging over me made the experience of managing my goals turn from a brief inspirational daily moment into an enervating daily chore. As a result I started updating goals only every other day, then only every 3 days or so, which caused to to slip on others, etc.
My take away is in the future to take it very seriously if I ever start falling behind on any individual goal. Some times the answer really is to push though it, but then I want to carefully ask myself at the end of the day if I am truly happy that I did these or if it is just something I am doing because I decided I should. If it is, is there something else I can drop to make it easier to refocus on what is important.
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I actually made a goal in October which was “enter data”, where I put 1 for
entering yesterday’s data, and 0 for not, with 6.5 expected per week. It
really has worked well for me.
It’s worked well enough I’m actually setting up a third-party website
that’ll make sure you check in every day to a subset of your goals, and
then post a datapoint to a goal when that happens. I don’t think you can
quite do that with IFTTT yet.
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That is an interesting idea, but it feels like treating the symptom. If I’m already ignoring warning emails that I’m falling behind on goals then I’m not sure an additional goal will help.
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Isn’t it so interesting how we are all different? For me, this works
really well.
There was an interesting daily email the other day about people who benefit
from Beeminder without “almost derailing all the time”, vs the people who
are close to derailing.
I am definitely in the first group, for the majority of my goals, but take
the goals away and I don’t do nearly as well!
Weird, huh?
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Most of the time, that additional goal would sit calmly near the bottom of the list. You’d automate the data entry via IFTTT, so no additional hassle as a goal. But it might be a good canary-in-the-coal-mine goal to warn you that you’ve started neglecting Beeminder.
Although I’ve not done that, using Beeminder to mind Beeminder, I certainly have a lot of meta-goals that make sure that I don’t forget about other systems: GTD, Complice, Gmail x 3, OmniFocus, etc.
If the warning emails are getting a bit much, you can change those settings. Both the reminder start time and the number of days. I’d probably go crazy if I got daily reminders about my blue/orange goals. What’s more, I’ve set my zeno reminder start time to the afternoon, so that if I get an eep! email, I really have to take it seriously.
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