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#autodialMinon 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 tocoding, 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. Likecoding,gym, andknitting, 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 withcleaning, 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.
Whew, that’s all my non-book goals!
Bookminder
“But @rperce”, you say, “what about those book-tagged goals[bmndr]?”
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
codinggoal! 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!