I have[bmndr] a calendial[blog] goal that I ostensibly go through every week to check all my goals rates, breaks, fine print, &c. — generally just keep my dashboard tidy and good to go. But I’ve noticed that I’ve kind of been phoning it in for a few weeks now! Which hasn’t been a big deal, because I haven’t needed any breaks… but I have a bunch of complex timing stuff coming up soon, so I need to take a little more effort on my calendialing. Plus, even though I haven’t missed a break, I definitely should have dialed some goals a little more proactively: I’ve had a bunch of derails recently.
So! I decided to keep a beeminder journal, which I love to read anyways, to act as a public commitment method to whole-ass my calendialing. Comments, questions, and advice are all extremely welcome!
For my first post here, I’ll go through the first half-ish of my non-book goals and briefly list out what and why they are, then talk about derailments, changes, &c. I’ll finish the list (or at least make more progress!) next week.
Goals
Rather than linking each one individually, here’s my non-book goals[bmndr].
books: manual; +1 for “started reading a book”. I’ll probably start paying more attention to the depth of my “to-read” stack and treat this like a control-systems goal[blog]… one day. For now, it’s at a very conservative 1/month. I used to read very voraciously, but it actually was to a problematic point, where I was reading to the neglect of general life maintenance. I hope to dial this back to up weeklyish eventually probably, but I’m not in any particular rush.
brushdark: manual; beenary +1 for “brushed teeth at any point between 17:00 and 05:00”. The complement to brushday, along with which replaces my old toothbrushing goal that I missed data entry on and had confusing derails on constantly. This one’s not due until noon of the following day, so the unit is actually “yesterday-brushings”, to give myself a data-entry grace period, since the thing I’m tracking is normally done so close to falling asleep.
brushday: manual; beenary +1 for “brushed teeth at any point between 05:00 and 17:00”. The complement to brushdark. One particularly nice thing about toothbrushing split into two goals is that it avoids the case where I’m about to go to bed and need to get +2 — I should have derailed in the morning. That doesn’t happen with two separate goals! Both brush* goals are autodialed[taskratchet] to a max rate of 7/wk.
calendial: manual: beenary +1 for “calendialed”. Read the linked blog post above! Also, you’re looking at it. 1/week, and if it ever drifts off of Sunday due to breaks or derails I ratchet it back to Sundays.
cardio: manual; beenary +1 for “put in cardio-health effort today”. Straightforward. I’m very lenient about what counts: just two minutes of effort. So if I’m really not feeling it, I can do a few minutes of jumping jacks and call it good. That doesn’t happen very often: normally I run at least 3–5km or play a long session of tennis or something. The most common source of a +1 recently is running to the gym. 4/wk, which is slightly more frequent than my autodial max of 3.5/wk for gym, so every once in a while (by design) I have to do a little bonus run or tennis game or whatnot.
chess-study: toggl; 0.5hr/wk. I enjoy chess, but easily fall into the trap of “mindless bullet games”. This goal makes me study opening lines, do puzzles, play slow games with thorough analysis afterwards, anything that’s more the “vegetables” of playing chess rather than the “junk food”.
cleandish: manual; beenary +1 for “cleaned all the dishes in the house by bedtime”. There’s a few exceptions: my wife’s lunchbox, anything in our housemate’s room, my espresso machine has its own cleaning goal, and it still counts if I fill and run the dishwasher and fill up the drying rack with handwashing and there’s still dishes left, as long as I stack them neatly in the sink and genuinely have done all I can without getting ridiculous and pulling out cookie racks to be dish-drying racks. That only happens if we have guests over, and even then rarely, but it’s still useful.
cleaning: manual; fractional[blog] for amount of daily-cleaning-checklists completed. My cleaning schedule is publicly visible on trello; this goal covers lists Monday through Weekend. Fortnightly and less frequent tasks are tracked in slow-cleaning. Practically, I track progress through these lists on paper notebooks. This is arguably my single most successful goal: I’m terrible at prioritizing and sticking with cleaning without this goal.
cleanspresso: manual; beenary +1 for “cleaned out the espresso machine and its drip tray by bedtime”. Split off from cleandish because I kept forgetting this bit and thus derailing, so I made them separate goals. Since then, funnily enough, I don’t think I’ve derailed once on cleanspresso!
Derailments
cleaning: I just… didn’t finish cleaning in time, instead getting distracted by setting up a samba share on our home server. Completely fair derailment, and honestly I’m happy to have the break: it’s been feeling kind of oppressive for the past week or so.
slow-cleaning, yoga, and chess-study: My wife and I went out to dinner yesterday with two of our friends, and then ended up hanging out at their place for the subsequent six hours. chess-study was at $0, and the other two were only at $5, so I was happy to pay ten bucks to get to spend an extra ~3 hours with our friends. In retrospect, I definitely could have seen that coming and knocked out all the beemos before we went to dinner, but… oh well!
New Goals
haaang: manual, seconds deadhanging from my hangboard. My shoulders have been super tight recently! Starting with an easy 15s per day.
Changes & notes
In light of the pile of recent derailments, I don’t want to make too many other changes until I see how the breaks feel: check this space next week!
New week, new calendial! I’ll start with continuing to describe my non-book-tagged goals[bmndr].
Goals
coding: toggl; autodialed. Tracks time spent doing side-project/fun/hobby coding (as opposed to day-job coding). Currently broken, actually, I think because I got above 30 days of safety buffer so it autodialed to 0 rate—I should probably stick an #autodialMin on there. I’ve been really motivated working on barkeep[gitlab], but really bad at tracking it since I have gobs of safety buffer… I’ll fix this with details down in Changes & Notes.
focusmate: focusmate integration, 1/week. I got to beta test this integration! After a few beta-test-expected hiccups, it’s been working fantastically.
gym: manual, beenary +1 for “went to gym today”. I set it to a very conservative 1/wk to start with but turned on autodialing. I’ve been nailing a perfect 3.5/wk since I created the goal—this is one of those goals where just knowing that there is a goal turned out to be all the motivation I needed. I really enjoy working out! Getting to the gym is just barely enough activation energy that I never did it consistently, though. Man, I love beeminder.
haaang: manual, seconds spent deadhanging from from my hangboard. I made this last week! It’s been awesome. My shoulders feel a lot better already! My plan is to keep increasing my time periodically until I get to 120s/day, at which point I’ll drop it back to 15 but move to the next most difficult slot on my hangboard. Going very, very slowly in increases to keep my finger tendons healthy—not only would a blown tendon suck for climbing, I also type on a keyboard for a living. Shoulder comfort/flexibility is more important to this goal than finger strength, so if I find that I want more deadhanging than I can get at a particular level I’ll just shift to the jugs on top of the hangboard and keep counting that time as well.
knitting: toggl; autodialed. Another hobby that I love as long as I have something ready to go, but picking a project and casting on is too much activation energy without beeminder poking at me. This is currently broken in a similar fashion to coding, but I’m ignoring it until next week at least: I’m buying yarn to make a cardigan Soon™ from the yarn store slash coffee shop that I start side-job work at tomorrow. Employee discount ahoy!
madebed: manual, beenary +1 for making the bed. I just like how a made bed looks! Also we have an electric blanket in the winter and if I don’t make the bed periodically it gets all rumpled up at the foot of the bed and then the rest of me is cold and also it’s probably a fire hazard or something.
must-do: manual, beenary +1 for “did the task in yesterday’s comment”. This is one of my absolute favorite goals. There’s a somewhat old but still useful blog post about doing this! I have a paper to-do list also; when it’s populated, I pick one thing off it. When it’s not, (or sometimes when it is), I put things like “rest”, “hydrate”, “snuggle my dog”, etc—it’s not really about having a grindset, just about being intentional.
newleaf: manual, beenary +1 for “woke up and stood up and recorded a +1 by the deadline”. This did a great job helping me bring my sleep schedule earlier for like a month or two, but then my wife started night shifts and we’re still figuring out when I should be going to bed to maximize seeing/snuggling her while also minimizing causing problems at work by showing up at weird times or missing meetings, so it’s on a long break. It’s got 11 days of break left—by next week I should be able to pick a reasonable deadline to start with.
piano: toggl, tracks time spent playing piano, amazingly enough. Like coding, gym, and knitting, another “I actually enjoy this a lot but it has just a little too much activation energy for my akrasia” activity. Right now I’m mostly working on Liszt’s Liebestraum[youtube] and Debussy’s La Fille aux cheveux de lin[youtube]!
slow-cleaning: manual, +1 for “did a task from the fortnightly or slower lists”. Goes along with cleaning, from last week’s post—check out the description and links up there. Notably not beenary: I can certainly knock out three or four tasks in a day!
wifegift: manual, +1 for “did something nice for my wife”. Obviously I try to be nice, like, all the time: this is for things like “brought home flowers” or “baked cookies while she was at work” or that kind of thing. I’m purposefully not very QS about this one: I don’t want to have to think about if I’m passing the right “threshold” of niceness if I do things without thinking about this goal, but whenever this goal turns Not Green it’s a great signal to go intentionally do something nice.
yoga: manual, +1 for “did a yoga session”. My threshold for “session” is “literally a single sun salutation”, and there’s definitely days where that’s all I can really muster. And that’s okay! Definitely another “activation energy” goal: I have to clear some space, get out my mat… which takes, y’know, about 30 seconds but. If I could think about that in the moment I wouldn’t need beeminder, probably.
They follow approximately the Project Bookminder strategy that @shanaqui writes about in their Journal topic[forum]: a flat-forever goal that I add a target and commitment to when I start to read it. I don’t update each book every day, though, unlike them: I just rely on books to prod me to start a new book. I don’t always finish the book: for example, my most recent book, The Standard Bearer (standard-bearer[bmndr]), was bad, so I archived it early. I kept reading until the archive went through in case I changed my mind! But I didn’t.
One thing I’ve noticed about this strategy is that it helps me not binge books: I have some sense of “well, the goal for this book is in the green already, so I can take it easy and go do anything else!”. This is really, really good.
Next week I will probably start a new book, but not right now!
Derailments
None! It helps that cleaning and slow-cleaning are just coming off their breaks from the last derailment. I have made some progress on them to keep my buffer up! But they’re normally pretty edge-skatey goals so we’ll see how it goes.
Changes & Notes
Fixed up my coding goal! Now it’s autodialed to a minimum of 6 min/week. I’ve also gone and conservatively estimated how much time I spent on the past couple days and retroactively logged that in toggl so there’s actual data now. I also discovered that it was only looking for a tag but that I had logged some but under a project so I fixed that too. Hooray, effective calendialing!
Increased focusmate's commitment to 2/wk—I’m on an 11-week streak with it and have really really been enjoying it (and find it very effective for productivity).
gym's deadline was at 23:00, like most of my goals, but this is one of the few things I’m okay pushing back bedtime to do instead of derailing, so I moved it to 03:00.
Doubled haaang's commitment to 30s per day, which is still really easy, but see above description about being gentle to my tendons!
Just today I started “American Generalship” (goal here[bmndr]), which my dad recommended to me. I’m a little skeptical if it’ll be interesting to me, what with not being in the military, but I told dad I’d give it a look!
Derailments
Technically I derailed on my must-do today, but I called non-legit because my thing was to show up to work on time, which I did, and then forgot to enter because I was working.
Changes & Notes
Entered a break for everything for April 8-12, when I’ll be on a trip. I’ve tried to keep basic maintenance goals like toothbrushing while on trips before, but my routine being thrown off means I just derail on everything and have to do lots of non-legit calls, so I don’t bother with that anymore and accept my break from data entry.
Absolutely no progress after the very first day on American Generalship, which is fine because I read enough for a week that day. Still too early to really tell if it’s any good, but at least I haven’t scheduled an archive yet!
Derailments
Expensive-for-support week for me! Oops.
Called non-legit
Even after writing last week’s post, I forgot to +1 the actual goal for calendial! No such excuse for me this week: if I forget to +1 again this week, it’s sticking. (Edit: I didn’t forget!)
must-do: derailed twice, both times because I Did The Thing but super close to the deadline and didn’t record in time, so I non-legitted both, which… sure felt bad. I have this one due at noon because frequently its task takes the shape “make that phone call you’ve been putting off”, and I’d like to at least have a chance to not have to leave a message and prolong my have-to-make-a-call status… but having it due during the workday sometimes means that I have a busy morning (or, y’know, procrastinate) and miss or almost miss. This is… not great! If anyone has ideas for scheduling changes I can make to make it easier to record this but still allow for must-do-s that have to happen during the weekday, uh, let me know!
As an aside on that one, I had some email shenanigans, but it turned out to be my provider, Fastmail, aggressively throttling incoming messages! So I need to reach out to them and see if that’s tunable per-account. Yes, beeminder sends me a lot of emails, I know, but I actually want them. I just made contacting them my next must-do!
Derailed on newleaf, my goal for waking up on time in the morning, genuinely because I’ve taken on a part time job at my favorite local café and I was so excited for my shift that I didn’t look at my phone until after it. My shift started before my goal wakeup time, so I certainly didn’t wake up late, so I called non-legit on this one. In the past, I’ve waffled with putting this one on no-excuses mode, so I’m kind of glad I didn’t, because it’s at a $30 charge right now and that would’ve felt really really bad. To that end, I’ve decreased its pledge, so that if (and when) I do legitimately derail it won’t totally ruin my day!
Legit
Just this morning, derailed on brushday, totally legit! I actually completely forgot to brush my teeth. Also even if I did brush my teeth this one is on no-excuses mode and I consider its units to actually be “days I brushed my teeth and remembered to record it on time”. But I didn’t. Ew!
Changes and Notes
Toned down a bunch of pledges: being a little scared of derailing is, y’know, arguably the entire point of beeminder, but I was stressing unhealthily about my pledges. Which objectively was a little silly—I could have derailed on literally everything and been totally financially fine—but my increased heartrate when looking at my pledge list don’t care about Objectively.
I’ve got a trip coming up, so everything will be on a break this weekend! If I’m lucky, I’ll remember to record some things that I do even during breaks and build up some safety buffer… but I probably won’t, which is why I put everything on break when I’m on a trip.
I ordered the yarn for a cardigan[ravelry] that I’m going to make and enough of it should arrive by Wednesday that I can start. I plan to make a bespoke goal for it to track row-count progress, so expect to see that by next week! I thought about making it now but (a) I’m lazy now and (b) once I have the yarn in hand I’m very confident I’ll want to get started right away and that’ll push me to make the goal so I can use it to track rows.
I had a break, so my calendial goal isn’t lined up to Sundays any more! When this happens I either do it on Sunday anyways and then ratchet to 7 days if I remember to, or if I don’t, I do it on whatever day and then ratchet so the next one is a Sunday. So the next post should be pretty short!
Bookminder
I’m a bit further into American Generalship at this point and have finally decided to mark it for archiving. This seems to be a book comprised almost entirely of quotes from successful generals who think they know why they’re successful, praising bold decision-making, but not having any data to back up the praise besides “well, it worked, didn’t it?”. This is… not entirely surprising, but still a little disappointing. I don’t have a book-tagged goal for it yet, but I’ll probably start the Vorkosigan Saga, which I haven’t read in almost a decade, and never in internal chronological order. It’ll be nice to read some comfy engaging sci-fi after this.
Derailments
Called non-legit
Didn’t happen! There’s one that I would have had to, but my late-entered datapoint squeezed in during the loophole period between the deadline and the processing of that deadline.
Legit
Derailed my must-doagain due to failed data entry, but I let this one stick, mostly because I was sick of data entry shenanigans with it and wanted a break anyways and was willing to eat the derail to not have to wait for the break.
Changes and Notes
I mentioned last post that I’ve learned (the hard way) that I need to put everything on a break while I’m on a trip. I’m hereby revising this policy to include the day or two (depending on trip length) preceding and following the trip itself: I had a bit of a packing-panic trying to get myself ready to leave but also not derail on the way to the airport. I managed! And now I know better for next time. I don’t have any more trips coming up for the rest of the month, but I do have one in mid-May that I’ll need to enter once its dates lock down more firmly Soon™.
Turned cardio down from 4/week to 3/week. I’ve taken a side gig at my favorite local coffee shop, which has been an absolute blast, but does have me a lot more generally active than before, but also takes more time, and it was getting annoying having more cardio days per week than gym days in a world where I was also working two jobs.
That reminds me: as we come officially out of winter, I need to start planning for my next race. I tentatively convinced a friend to train with me at least for a 10k, so I need to rummage around and see what options we have. I’ve added that to my to-do list.
I turned focusmate back down to 1/wk: keeping up with 2/wk was fine, but my team at work has been doing a lot more similar things internally, so I don’t need as much external influence as I did a few weeks ago.
I’ve been feeling kinda in a rut with chess-study, and my elo[lichess] has been sliding big-time. I need to study either more or different… but for now I’m just scheduling a two-week break from study and just taking it easy and we’ll see how I feel afterwards.
As an aside—if you’re reading this and are on lichess, follow or challenge me at that link! Always down to play a few games
haaang's autodial settings were messed up; I fixed them.
And here’s the tiny update I mentioned! Unsurprisingly, nothing has happened in the last two days, except that I’m working on two new goals, inbox-zero and email-control. I’m not sure if they’re working properly yet and I’m working on their setup right now so I’ll maybe remember to update this when I get them setup and, if not, next week!
I started the chronologically first Vorkosigan Saga book, Falling Free this past week! I didn’t even stay up all night to finish it immediately; I’m very proud of myself. Goal is falling-free.
Derailments
Called non-legit
None!
Legit
must-do again! I made it not due at noon anymore, even though there were some benefits, the derailments—both legit and non-legit—were not worth it. We’ll see how it goes with end-of-day.
I just didn’t get to yoga before the deadline! I had been thinking of moving my deadlines later and kind of thought I’d already done it, but definitely hadn’t. Oops!
I missed scheduling my focusmate for 11:45 by a minute, and you can only schedule at 15 minute steps, so I had to do it at midnight, which counted as the next day. Nothing is surprising or bad here! I had ample chances to schedule it earlier. That one was at $0, though.
Changes and Notes
As I alluded to on my yoga derail, I’ve moved my default deadlines to 1am! My wife is night shift now so I’m also staying up and waking up later than I used to.
I scheduled a break for everything for early May for a small trip we’re taking!
I have two new goals! inbox-zero[bmndr] and email-control[bmndr]. I’ve wanted an inbox-zero style goal for a little while, but I don’t use gmail. So I wrote my own tool[gitlab]! I have a more detailed forum post about that here[forum]. It works basically just like the gmail integration kind of inbox-zero goal, except that it tracks total emails, not just read. I’m not sure how that’ll work with breaks—we’ll find out! email-control is a manual control-system goal (see previous post) for dealing with my starred emails.
I finished falling-free very early, but without causing myself any issues! I mostly read on my kindle at the gym between sets. This was very effective!
I also finished the second book in the series, shards-of-honor.
I have a long drive coming up—from Wisconsin to Texas—this week, so I’ll probably finish the next Several. I won’t make goals for them until I get back, though, since I’ll probably be finishing one or two a day, while my wife is driving, and that sounds tedious to track the datapoints for.
I did pick up the 2015 edition of Getting Things Done, and made a goal to track that at, unsurprisingly, getting-things-done. Inspired by @poisson’s intention to hew closer to the GTD system, I’m not sure how relevant it is to me, but I’ve never actually read the whole book and (a) I’m sure there’s some good ideas or influence in there and (b) @poisson often has reasonably good ideas so I take them thinking it’s a good idea as a pretty good endorsement to at least check it out. I set the goal to finish a month after I get back from the aforementioned drive.
Derailments
Called non-legit
Had a meeting at 09:30 that I just barely woke up in time for, and was too busy doing that to datalog that I was awake for my 10:00 newleaf wake-up-before-this-goal’s-deadline goal. Since the point of the goal is to wake up on time, and I did, I didn’t mind non-legitting this one! It and must-do are probably my biggest contenders for no-excuses mode (besides brush{dark,day}, which already have it set), but they’re not quite enough of a problem that I feel like adding that.
Legit
None!
Changes and Notes
inbox-zero is going swimmingly! I’m actually really really enjoying having it. I love being at inbox zero and there’s been three or four times already where knowing I have the goal is just enough of a push to actually deal with the Mildly Ugh Email that I have.
On a related note, for email-control, I’ve decided to start recording the delta in the value, as I was before, but populating the comment with the total number of remaining Important Emails That Are In The Folder To Handle. Eventually I’ll write a script to graph those metapoints so I can determine if I’m redqueening or not, and adjust the target rate as part of calendialing. With a whopping one (1) such metapoint, I can’t draw any trend lines yet, so… I’m ignoring this for now.
It took longer than I originally expected but I FINALLY got the yarn I need for the cardigan I’ve been intending to knit! As such, I’ve just dialed my knitting goal to a nonzero rate and ratcheted it to a week.
Hey, this isn’t on Sunday! It’s true; I had a break and that threw off the schedule. I just went and did the “check for breaks” part of calendialling, but I burnt my thumb today and typing one-handed is rather annoying, so I’ll ratchet my goal and do the writeup part on Sunday, two days from now!
Hello, Actual Sunday! My thumb is not 100% healed but it’s much better.
Bookminder
As expected, I read a lot of the Vorkosigan Saga: the next five in the series, during the long drive! Getting Things Done is progressing apace. There’s a lot of “this could have been two blog posts but your publisher wanted a full book” to wade through but there’s also a few good little bits. One thing I found particularly irksome was the claim that “identifying task completion was so much easier in the old days. You tilled the field until you got to the end of the field then you were good to go!” (paraphrased): this man has clearly never set foot in a garden.
I sent five books off to the thrift store and scheduled archives for their flat-forever goals.
Derailments
None at all since the last post! It helps that a good chunk of that time was on a break, of course. Although I have six beemos due in 80 minutes, so I better really get cracking. This post is one of them!
Changes and Notes
inbox-zero's break worked perfectly and has now ended: I used the road editor to put a large segment in the road so that accumulating unread emails was fine while on break. The only fiddly bit was picking a value for that segment that would be definitely safe; I went for 100 and only got up to 8 so, uh, success.
I’ve managed to accumulate 12 days of buffer on gym so I ratcheted that down to 1. I’d like to go tonight if my other beemos dispatch quickly, but I figured tomorrow if they don’t is also fine.
chess-study came off its long break and I haven’t really changed anything but I feel much better about it. I think a break was just the right thing!
cleandish had 11 days of buffer; that’s down to 1.
cleanspresso had… 62. Ratched to 1 and autodialMin set to 0.4/day.
I ratched knitting from 33 days to 2 and increased its autodialMin to 0.5hr/week. I’ll almost certainly blow past that since I’m so excited for my cardigan project but it’s totally fine if I get busy and don’t — there’s not a particular deadline I’m aiming for.
I finished Getting Things Done! There was some good stuff in there but also a tremendous amount of “the publisher thinks a 200 page book will look better” fluff. I’ve set the goal to end tonight using @shanaqui’s excellent guide[forum].
I started the next Vorkosigan Saga book, Cetaganda, and set up cetaganda for it. I started reading it at the gym today, so its first data point is kindle location 1726, not 0.
Derailments
I derailed on chess-study this week. It’s a Toggl-integration goal, which means it has to be due at midnight, which I forgot about—most of my goals are due at 1am. I could have looked at my phone at, like, any point, and noticed that, though.
Changes and Notes
I scheduled an archive for chess-study just now: my primary motivation to improve was going to an in-person chess club in town, and I’m moving soon, so I’ve lost motivation. I scheduled “look for chess club/meetup options” for a few weeks after the move, though, so hopefully I find something good and find myself remotivated to bring this back. I haven’t stopped playing chess entirely, but… doing a ton of bullet games and not improving isn’t as galling when my only reason to play is fun bullet games.
I scheduled a long break for focusmate. With the move, a lot of my work is going to be from not-ideal-for-video-call locations, so I don’t want to worry about trying to make that happen while on, like, hotel wifi.
Ratcheted knitting down to 2 days again—there’s a change in pattern I need to fiddle with for a bit until I can get back in a smooth knittin’ groove, which has just enough of an ugh field to it that I want a little nudge from the goal.
Ratcheted brushday and brushdark down to beemergencies. I’ve been rather consistent at them, but it was starting to stress me out that I had so much safety buffer! I don’t want to be able to somehow go ten days without brushing and not have beeminder prodding me. I mean, I almost certainly wouldn’t, but now I can’t.
Steepened piano's autodialMin from 0 to 0.75 hr/week. A few recent breaks means all my autodialled goals have rather low rates at the moment, and that’s mostly fine & as-intended, but this one I wanted a slightly higher “baseline rate”.
Wouldn’t it be funny if I actually created my goals when I downloaded the ebooks?
Anyways. I just made ethan-of-athos for the next Vorkosigan Saga book. It’s set to end in two weeks. I also added a to-do list entry for pre-emptively downloading a bunch of books for travel time moving to Texas, which I won’t bother tracking again.
I graph-edited cetaganda to end itself tonight, since it’s done.
Derailments
None!
Changes and Notes
Remember the change in pattern I mentioned last week? Well, I sat down to sort it out, and discovered instead that the whole cuff I’d done was in the wrong needle size. I’m almost back to the pattern-change but in the right size… so I ratcheted knitting to two days again.
I scheduled a long break for haaang, since I’ll be moving and then on my honeymoon soon, and that one requires me to have my fingerboard set up. I’m not sure if I’ll even be able to set it up, since we’re moving to an apartment, so I also scheduled a task for 9 days before it comes off break to check if I should archive it—by then I should know if it’s possible to let it come off break (possibly with changes). Worst case, I extend the break and set another check-in task.
I scheduled breaks for everything during my honeymoon. Related: the ?start and finish urlparams on https://www.beeminder.com/breaks are amazing but I desire also a select-all or something like that that sets the initial state of every checkbox to true. I’ll file another forum thread about that. (EDIT: as promised, a thread!)
I mentioned last week that the Getting Things Done book had a tremendous amount of fluff; as a “review” pass I went through my epub and edited as I went, ending up removing ~65-70% of the content that was originally there. Goodness! Like I said, there were some great ideas, and I’ve set up some lists and files and things in accordance with a GTD-style approach using Obsidian’s excellent Kanban community plugin. I’m planning to set up a beeminder goal around freshening/keeping up with this, but I’m waiting to do that until after move & honeymoon finish disrupting my normal routine. Keep an eye on this space for more news!
Edit: I’ve just +1’d my goal and with all my breaks coming up in June my goal says I’m good for 27 days! So it’ll… probably be about that many days before I update here again. I might squeeze a calendial check-in between breaks but if I don’t get to it and want to let the goal run itself down, I’m totally fine with that. June’s gonna be a Lot! In a good way, but still.
My break was wonderful! The move… went! It was a heck of a Lot but the beeminder break went very well! My honeymoon was extremely wonderful and the vacation was much needed—and it’s good to be back!
Bookminder / Derailments
None! Since everything was on break. I’ve just ratcheted books to 7 days, so I’ll something new to report next week.
Other Changes and Notes
I created a rolochecks goal for “touch my rolodex” before I left on the advice of @poisson, either adding information/status or reaching out to people so I can update their “last contacted on” date. It’s on break until Jul 3 so I don’t have to worry about it yet.
I’m excited to be back and able to practice piano again so I ratcheted that to two days.
I mentioned in the last entry that haaang had a long break scheduled. My calendar-scheduled “think about what to do with haaang” task came up, and I’ve decided to just archive it for now. I’m not able to put my hangboard up in my rented apartment, but I also now live reasonably close to my favorite actual climbing gym, so it shouldn’t be needed in several different ways.
I haven’t really had any issues with keeping up with my GTD lists in Obsidian that I mentioned last time—even around my honeymoon! I still recorded “oh, I should do this” stuff but didn’t process anything until after, which I was excited to do and went well. If this continues to go well without a goal, I won’t bother with adding the overhead of a goal to it—but I’ll continue to keep an eye on how it’s feeling when I make this calendial posts.
After +1ing calendial, I’ll add a one-day break, so my next update will be next Sunday, getting me back on my preferred calendial schedule.
I started the-mission, by David Brown, yesterday. So far I’m… underwhelmed, but maybe it’s just a slow start. I like that in this context the akrasia horizon is a “give it a fair shake” horizon!
Derailments
None! I would have derailed on inbox-zero during my honeymoon because I forgot to set a break (or, rather, did set a break… which just introduces a flat spot, which does absolutely nothing for an already-flat whittle-down). Luckily, support saved the day! Thanks, support. Thupport.
Changes & notes
I finally found what feels like a good requirement for knitting right now, at 1.5hr/week. Making excellent progress on my cardigan! About 1/3 of the way through the first sleeve. And, crucially, I haven’t hurt my fingers yet, as I was wont to do in the past by overdoing it.
I’m considering archiving newleaf, since I haven’t even come close to having issues in a few months now. I think I’ll stick with it through July, then make the call.
coding has found itself on an infinite flatspot again, but I also just realized I forgot to track with Toggl the ~3hr I spent coding a beeminder → ICS file server, prompted on by a daily beemail. I’ve just retrologged that, which should kick the autodialler into gear.
It’s not an actual change, but I just wanted to note that inbox-zero continues to be extremely awesome.
I’m trying out “orange is the new red”, although I did it by working extra hard for two days rather than scheduling a break, because I had a lot of cleaning & unpacking I wanted to do anyways. So far it seems really really nice, but it’s only been a few days of it so far. To that end, I’ll be adding a 1-day break to calendial right after I do my +1, so that it’s orange next Sunday instead of red.
The Mission continues to be decent enough to keep reading. Nice!
I got some books from the library! Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds and Jingo by Terry Pratchet. Comfy books! Goals at slow-bullets and jingo, respectively.
Changes & notes
No derailments!
Ratched brushday and brushdark down to 1 day.
Small updates this week: I’ve pretty much just been cruisin’ along! My break to adjust calendial’s color on Sundays doesn’t go into effect until next week, because of the akrasia horizon, so I’m just doing this week’s a day early.
I finished slow-bullets and jingo already! They were both good fun reads.
I started Staff Engineer by Will Larson at the behest of my boss and grandboss at work, having just been promoted to that title. I’m only about 10% in so far, but it actually seems pretty good! So now I just have that and The Mission in progress (which continues to stay just on this side of “keep reading”: at this point, I’ll probably finish!), but I have a couple of holds in at the library that theoretically should be ready in the next week.
Changes & notes
OitNR[forum] has been so successful for me—and surprisingly easy to reprogram my brain to be distressed about seeing Orange as it was about Red—that I haven’t even had a brief concern about derailing since I started trying it out two calendials ago. Unless I lose track of it, I won’t bother writing a whole header for “Derailments: none!” for future calendial-posts.
Goals under consideration:
Anki (I started re-studying geography with this deck[ankiweb] recently), which has been fun enough on its own so far that I haven’t felt the need for a goal but I’m keeping an eye on it
GTD is riiiiight on the edge of needing a goal to keep up with and one of my to-do list entries is to set up a “hello world” Obsidian plugin to see if I could automate beeminding to-do list depth
My Spanish practice has fallen by the wayside these past few months and a goal would definitely get me back into, I just have to decide if I actually want to do that and what a good metric would be. If I haven’t decided anything else before next calendial or am still waffling, I’ll make a new 3/week beenary goal for “did anything related to practicing spanish”, just to get something going to start collecting data about what works well for me and how I feel about it.
I bought some new accessories for my beloved Singer Featherweight (a thread stand and a replacement motor belt) and I’m debating if that counts as enough of a purchase to warrant a Beemind What You Buy goal. In the same vein of “not making a decision is making a decision”, if I’m still waffling by next calendial I’ll do a 30min/week toggl goal for sewing.
rolochecks was brand-new a few calendials ago and it’s been awesome and I just ramped it to “slightly faster”, from 3/wk to 4/wk, because I added a bunch of old coworker contacts that are now clogging up my “time since last reached out” list that I need to work through with hellos.
The Mission and Staff Engineer continue apace; I’ve added Julia Galef’s The Scout Mindset, which I’ve been meaning to read for ages and finally picked up from the library. I’m historically really bad about actually reading my library books… turns out, unsurprisingly, that beeminder goals help!
Derailments
I derailed on inbox-zero, but I was pretty sure that I’d checked before going to the movies and didn’t have any beemos. As a whittle-down with automated data sourcing[forum], it theoretically can be a surprise… but my script runs every hour and I didn’t see issues in logs? I’ve noticed some other color weirdness with the android app widget in the past, so my working theory is some kind of android widget staleness or bug. Support is on the case, and I called non-legit in the meantime.
Changes & notes
I had some actual red goals this week! I let cleaning go to True Red, because I spent several hours out with friends yesterday and was fine burning some safety buffer. It’s kind of like a mini-derail, where instead of a monetary cost I just have to work double today. Which, luckily, I wanted to do anyways—my goal was doing fine but I was a little behind on cleaning, since I’d been orange-skating for a week or so. OitNR doing its job swimmingly!
Rather than trying to figure out the perfect metric for GTD tracking, I started gtd off as a simple beenary goal, 0.8/day, +1 for “touched my gtd file”.
Steepened & ratcheted staff-engineer, since I got way ahead.
Steepened & ratcheted cleandish, which didn’t have an autodialMin, and along with some breaks had accumulated more than a month of safety buffer!
Same story for brushdark, though it wasn’t so far gone.
I’ve a new coding project I want to get started this week, so I ratcheted coding to 5 days.
I was still undecided/waffley about Spanish and sewing goals, so per my requirements from last week, I made goals! spanish is 3/week beenary “did anything related to studing spanish”; sewing is 30min/week toggl. I had an old archived sewing goal, but I don’t think it had the toggl settings I wanted, and I wanted to start this fresh goal at $0, so I renamed that one to sewing-archived.
Goals under consideration (maybe I should make this a header-section, instead of sub-bullets?)
Anki still doesn’t need a goal, still keeping an eye on it.
I decided to try regular journalling; it’s too new of a thing to know how I actually feel about it. But it’s possible it’ll want a goal!
The Mission is getting boring again; I considered archiving it but instead am just skimming to see if there’s anything good later.
I finished Staff Engineer yesterday! The Scout Mindset continues.
New book from the library, new goal: agency for Agency by William Gibson.
Changes and Notes
We figured out the inbox-zero issue: my script! It doesn’t create new datapoints if the current state matches the last datapoint, to prevent ridiculous datapoint spam. But I had a rare day where I got precisely zero emails overnight, all the way until almost 21:00 the following day… so when that email finally came in, my script dutifully recorded “1”, and becuase it hadn’t recorded any of the hours of zero (since they all matched the zero from the previous day), aggmin (correctly!) said my min for the day was… one. Which is >0, so I derailed. I plan to have a fix out for jmap-beeminder-reporter[gitlab] later today that just always does at least one datapoint every 6 hours.
A few more goals hit True Red again—cardio, yesterday—again because I had friends over. Excellent!
Put autodial mins on brushdark and brushday.
Steepened the autodial min and max for gym, now that I’m properly settled in to our new apt and have more time for that sort of thing.
Steepened books to reflect how much more I’m reading recently. Love it!
I mentioned that I was considering archiving newleaf at the start of July; now that we’re at the end of July, I have indeed scheduled an archive. It did its job of pulling my sleep schedule back to something reasonable! If I ever notice I’ve drifted away again, I’ll just bring it right back.
The Mission got boringer; I skimmed enough to be satisfied that I didn’t care anymore and archived the goal.
Scout Mindset is done. Nothing particularly new for me, but well-presented. Easy to recommend!
Agency is done. Outstanding book!
I’m sort of in-between books right now… but I’ve got three library holds coming in Soon™, so I don’t mind taking a breather and getting ahead on non-reading goals for bit.
Changes and Notes
I was considering archiving must-do, actually, which I’d previously described as one of my most successful goals ever, because my other to-do lists and GTD systems and beeminder goals have been doing an excellent job, so I’d had a lot of must-do entries that were just “tbd” or “check with [wife]”. Which isn’t inherently a problem or anything, but I wasn’t sure if I was getting enough value from the manual entry. I’ve also been thinking of setting up a new goal to beemind Next Actions depth in my gtd file. I decided to combine these ideas by declaring for myself that if I don’t have anything obvious to must-do, instead of putting “tbd”, I put “handle next actions”. I’ll report in the future how well that’s going
Ratcheted gtd, piano, and rolochecks.
newleaf’s archive went through this morning, which I noticed because I was awake on time and went to +1 it.
New library books! House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip, tracked at house-of-suns and beasts-of-eld respectively. Plus on StoryGraph.
Changes and Notes
I made a new goal, pages, for total pages read across all books, with the StoryGraph integration. I intend for this to supplant books, which gets a manual +1 when I start a new book, but for now I’m keeping both around while I trial the StoryGraph-based goal. It is subtly different, ofc, in that tracking pages doesn’t weight small and large books differently, whereas tracking books is theoretically “cheatable” by choosing to read tiny books, but for me I think that’s an ice cream truck loophole[blog] so I don’t expect any practical difference.
Turned on autodialling for madebed, with a minimum of its current rate of 3/week. Right now the 30d average is actually below that because of a break, but it’ll eventually start to push it up.
Ratcheted brushday and brushdark to 1d each, making them OitNR-beemos.
Ratcheted coding to 8 days—I’ve a project I’d like to make movement on somewhen this week.
I’m almost back to the pattern-change but in the right size… so I ratcheted 