Why lichess over chess.com?
That’s easy—Lichess is free and open-source, doesn’t serve ads or sell user data, and is a nonprofit! They have an excellent open API and are built to be readily hackable and extensible. So from a business morals standpoint, I strongly prefer to support Lichess chess.com (which stands in stark contrast to almost all of the things I mentioned about Lichess: it’s closed-source, requires a subscription, collects usage and personal data to serve you advertisements, and is a for-profit company. They do have an API, though I haven’t used it to see if it’s actually any good).
Also, I like the UX on Lichess better.
I had a vacation to NYC! It was lovely. Tiny update today, and I’ll ratchet calendial
for a bigger update this coming Sunday.
Changes and notes
- Cleared up my break on
inbox-zero
. True Breaks for whittle-downs is gonna be, eventually, soooooo nice.
As promised: big calendial ahoy!
Changes and notes
- Customary ratchets on
brushdark
,cleanspresso
,brushday
,cleandish
,madebed
,flossing
,rolochecks
,lichess-puzzles
. - Retroedited the bright red line for
anki-zero
andsleepyhead
to better reflect a realistic rate—I started both at “hilariously low” to make sure the goals would work for me before committing.anki-zero
is at 0.8/day now, andsleepyhead
is at 0.35/day (which is still a little low, but it also is set up to autodial—I just wanted to skip it ahead!). Thanks, graph.beeminder.com! - Cleaned some unnecessary breaks up out of
pages
and gave it a big ratchet, from 118 days of safety down to 7. I’m not sure I want to make the rate (currently, 15/day) more aggressive, but I’m definitely considering it.
I had a little trip this weekend I never put a break in for, so my goals were a bit tight and I had a fair handful dip into the red, but I avoided any derailments!
Changes and notes
- Customary ratchets on
sleepyhead
,flossing
,dont-starve
,cleanspresso
, andcleandish
. - For
coding
this week, I punted on tidying up my beenary userscript and instead got cracking on a storygraph per-book integration (using Puppeteer, a javascript interface to chromedriver[github]) because that’s more immediately annoying. - I’ve got a few new-goal ideas but I’m punting on making any big changes until after the holidays.
Had a lovely holiday break! We leave for a skip trip on Thursday, which leads me into a new section:
Breaks
I didn’t get breaks set in time for my mid-December trip, my Christmas trip, or my upcoming ski trip (to Steamboat Springs, in Colorado), so I’ve been scrambling before each trip to get my goals all in order. So, new calendial section! Each calendial, I’ll check the next three weeks (two is all that’s necessary if I never miss a calendial, but +1 for another layer of backup), note those ranges here, and set goal-breaks accordingly.
- 2023W1: Break starting on the 6th…
- 2023W2: …and ending on the 15th.
- 2023W3: No breaks.
I’ll play around with this format, probably.
Changes and notes
- My wrists have been bugging me a little when practicing piano, so the break for
piano
that starts on the 6th will continue through the end of February to give me a nice rest. - I’m gearing up to post in @poisson’s resolution thread[forum] and expect a handful of goal changes to come out of that, but nothing just yet: I’m pretty stable, but I think I’ll want to that to change. Details to come in the next calendialling post, which won’t be next week (since I’ll be skiing) but the one after.
Had a lovely ski trip! We leave for another in early February :3
Breaks
- 2023W03–2023W04: No breaks.
- 2023W05: Break starting on the 3rd and ending on the 11th.
Changes and notes
- My break that just ended today started a little late (as I mentioned last post) so I extended it a few extra days to help make up for it. I used that as an opportunity to start pushing my urgency load down: I’m now operating on “<4d is the new Red”. I would just say “3d” but:
- I made a new
gratitude
goal as a result of chatting with @poisson yesterdya to track me posting on the Gratitude Journalling Together forum thread. I like that better than gratitude journalling in my own actual journal, but if there’s ever a day that for whatever reason I’d rather write privately than publicly, that’s OK too and still worth a +1. - As promised last post, I posted in the Resolution Thread, and while I’m not doing New Year’s resolutions this year, I am doing seasonal resolutions, and have a few new goals to track some of those seasonal resolutions!
-
cleandesk
(link) is to get me to keep my desk more clean than the once-a-week it’s due forcleaning
anyways. Beenary, +1 for “cleaned desk all the way”. -
weekly-review
(link) is to get me to process my GTD inbox more often, clear out stale tasks, make sure I have actions for all my projects, etc. I had a process set up for this and was ignoring it: a prototypical beeminderable task! Beenary, +1 for “checked off everything on my weekly review checklist” (which, for the interested, is in the below collapse).
-
Weekly Review
- Gather inputs from journal & notebook
- Check on any waiting-fors
- Consider every someday/maybe and discard stales or promote to active projects
- Process inputs to actions/projects/do-immediately
- Empty “Project without actions”
- Scan actions for stales & completes
My source of truth is in Obsidian; “Projects without actions” is a chunk of dataview I have that makes sure (1) every entry in my projects list has an associated tag, and (2) every projects tag has at least one associated action.
Breaks
No differences from last time, but I have some new goals that needed their breaks touched up.
- 2023W04: No breaks.
- 2023W05: Break starting on the 3rd…
- 2023W06: …and ending on the 11th.
New Goals
- I forgot to mention last time, but I made a goal called
seasonal-goals
that enforces that I create new seasonal goals later in the year. This might live better as just a calendar reminder or a scheduled TaskRatchet or something, I’m not sure. It works for now, at least. -
sciaglide
tracks sessions of sciatic nerve glides. My hamstrings are super tight and I havehamstrings
to enforce stretch time as well, but I discovered that nerve glides on the sciatic nerve (which passes from the lower back through the hamstring and calf down into the foot) help improve mobility as well and make that hamstring stretching more effective.
Changes and notes
Time for a big ensteepening! Many of my beenary goals have weeks or even months of buffer at this point: clearly I can be a little more aggressive with them.
- Sloped
lichess-puzzles
1 ⇒ 1.2 daily; ratcheted 85 ⇒ 8 days - Sloped
email-control
0.14 ⇒ 0.2 daily; ratcheted 34 ⇒ 8 days - Sloped
rolochecks
0.29 ⇒ 0.4 daily; ratcheted 33 ⇒ 8 days - Autodial-min for
cleanspresso
0.4 ⇒ 0.6 daily; ratcheted 31 ⇒ 8 days - Autodial applied to
cleandesk
at 0.5 daily min; ratcheted 29 ⇒ 8 days - Sloped
flossing
4 ⇒ 5 weekly; ratcheted ratcheted 21 ⇒ 8 days - Sloped
madebed
3 ⇒ 5 weekly; ratcheted 24 ⇒ 8 days - Autodial-min for
sleepyhead
0 ⇒ 0.2 daily; ratcheted 24 ⇒ 8 days - Autodial-min for
fiber-arts
1.5 ⇒ 1.75 hr weekly; ratcheted 24 ⇒ 21 days (tried to go to 14 days, but upcoming break interfered) - Autodial-min for
coding
1 ⇒ 1.25 hr weekly - Autodial-min for
brushday
5 ⇒ 6 weekly; ratcheted 16 ⇒ 8 days - Autodial-min for
cleandish
3 ⇒ 3.5 weekly; ratcheted 11 ⇒ 8 days - Autodial-min for
brushdark
5 ⇒ 6 weekly - Sloped
dont-starve
2 ⇒ 2.2 daily
Whew!
Breaks
No changes!
- 2023W05: Break starting on the 3rd…
- 2023W06: …and ending on the 11th.
- 2023W07: No breaks.
Changes and notes
- Super busy week for me—we’re working on buying a house! I’ve been holding my goals together, but only just, which means I haven’t built up a notable amount of buffer on anything or made any new goals or suchlike, and also that my urgency load is higher.
- No calendial next week while I’m on a ski trip! Related, I have some customary ratchets I would normally be doing here (e.g. for
brushday
andbrushdark
), but the break for that trip is too close so they’re not really ratchetable at the moment. So… more of that, next-calendial-I-do!
Breaks
- 2023W07–2023W09: No breaks.
Changes and notes
- Eek, my urgency load! My 3-days-is-the-new-red has fallen back down to Orange Is The New Red: I didn’t make my vacation break quite long enough. Or, alternatively, I did, but got confused before the vacation and stopped doing stuff too early. Not a big deal, I’ll pull it back up! This sort of thing is what safety buffer is for.
- Customary ratchets of
flossing
(to 7d),gym
(to 7d),email-control
(to 4d),sleepyhead
(4d),madebed
(4d),brushday
(3d),brushdark
(3d), andcleanspresso
(3d). - I had
slow-cleaning
at 5.6 cleaning tasks per week for a good while, since I’d calculated that anything above that would make so that, eventually, I run out of tasks to do. But that doesn’t take into account breaks or derails, and I’m not really sure how it handles missed tasks. But, certainly, there’s a lot of slow-cleaning tasks I haven’t finished, so I’m cranking it up to 6/wk for now and just keeping an eye on available task depth, ramping down if I ever need to.
Breaks
- 2023W09: March 5th through…
- 2023W10: …the 8th, helping recover my urgency load.
- 2023W11: No breaks.
Derailments
I derailed on gym
yesterday; I was sick last week and am still recovering. I’m definitely healthy enough to have done at least a home workout, but I really didn’t feel like it, so… I didn’t. It was at $0, though, so the consequences are mostly “I got a break”.
Changes and notes
- I was doing a good job pulling my urgency load back down before I got sick, and now I’m back in shambles. Alas! I set a break to help me recover and just have to stumble along at OitNR for the next week.
Breaks
- 2023W11: No breaks
- 2023W12: March 21st through…
- 2023W13: the 28th, for a ski trip to Snowbird, Utah.
Changes and notes
- As you can see from my urgency load, my break did an excellent job letting me catch up! I was actually feeling really overwhelmed even with that, because of all the work to do on the house, so I made the break bigger and had a nice handful of days of not having to think about tracking at all. Except that threw off
calendial
, so I didn’t dial last week, and today is Monday. Oops! I’ll miss next week for my ski trip, but then should be back to my regularly scheduled programming. - I’ve started planning my Spring seasonal goals. I know I want to meditate more; that’ll be one of them. Other contenders: more efficient work hours, drink more water, have less hobby equipment, house renovation / improvement progress, improve wardrobe, fitness improvements (wrists specifically, also general gym consistency). It’s going to be a little tricky deciding what’s most important! Expect a post in this Resolutions thread between today and the 20th—I’ll link to it next calendial post as well.
- My bedtime (tracked by
sleepyhead
) has moved from 1am to 12:30am: I’ve found I keep needing to be up early for house stuff, and haven’t gotten enough sleep recently. It has a ridiculous amount of buffer right now, but as usual I’m not going to fiddle with the buffers until after my upcoming break. I did, however, increase autodialMin from 0.3 to 0.4.
Breaks
- 2023W14–2023W16: No breaks. Wild!
Changes and notes
- Finally done with breaks, goodness! Holiday season shifts right into ski season and boy did I spend a lot of time away from my routine. Honestly, excited to settle back into it!
- Because of the breaks, though, my goals are all in a nice low-urgency-load spot, and I’d like to keep them that way. The dream, of course, is 7 days, so that the akrasia horizon is totally ignorable; that’s what I’m shooting for! We’ll see how it goes.
- Ramping
slow-cleaning
up from 6/wk to 7/wk. -
flossing
: 0.7/d → 0.85/d; ratcheted to 7d. -
brushday
: 0.85/d → 0.95/d; ratcheted to 7d. -
brushdark
: 0.85/d → 0.95/d; ratcheted to 7d. -
pages
: 15/d → 30/d; ratcheted to 7d. - I picked up The Rook by Daniel O’Malley from the library recently; it’s due on the 13th so I added a goal,
the-rook
, to track that. -
madebed
: 3/wk → 4/wk; ratcheted to 7d. - I felt a strong “ugh field” around journalling, and have for a little while, so I put my
journal
goal on a month-long break and will re-evaluate it then, see if it’s worth keeping or not. -
cleandesk
: 0.5/d → 0.7/d.
New seasonal goals—for more info, see that thread[forum]!
-
endoscreen
to track progress on an app that a few of my friends are putting together. -
meditate
, to beenarily track meditation sessions.
Breaks
- 2023W15–2023W16: No breaks.
- 2023W17: Short break from the 29th through the 1st: my parents are coming to visit and help out with work on the new house!
Changes and notes
-
cleanspresso
: 0.6/d → 0.85/d; ratcheted to 7d. - I switched
brushday
andbrushdark
to “daily” rates instead of “weekly” but forgot to changeautodialMin
accordingly so they both got set to six brushes a day. Support had to fix that up; I fixed the commitments back to 0.95/d and turned off autodialling for them for now. -
lichess-puzzles
: 1.2/d → 1.5/d; ratcheted to 7d. - I finished
the-rook
and archived the goal.
I forgot to calendial on Sunday! In my defense, I was rather busy moving; in my not-defense, I totally could have made a bit of time. Which leads me to:
Derailments
-
calendial
!
Breaks
- 2023W17: Still the short break next weekend for my parents’ visit. Thanks, three-weeks-out-breaks-check!
- 2023W18–2023W19: No breaks.
Changes and notes
As I’ve been rather busy with moving, as mentioned, my urgency load is a bit up and I’m not making any changes. Things feel broadly sustainable at the moment, even with the move, luckily!
Breaks
- 2023W18–2023W20: No breaks.
Changes and notes
- Just cruisin’ along, goals feeling very stable. A small break for my parents’ visit was nice for pulling that urgency load down. As long as I stick to my beenaries things should be much greener by next calendial, fingers crossed.
- New goal:
nailtrim
, for exactly what it says on the tin. Beenary; starting with once every two weeks and will ramp up if needed.
Breaks
- 2023W19: No breaks.
- 2023W20: I’ve added a break from the 15th through the 17th—we’re visiting our parents for Mother’s Day, so this will help catch up.
- 2023W21: No breaks.
Changes and notes
- I scheduled a two-week break for
fiber-arts
,piano
,cleaning
, andslow-cleaning
to focus on home renovation & maintenance. - I’ve replaced
lichess-puzzles
, powered by a script I wrote, to the official autodata-sourcedlichess-training
. Huzzah! They’re both active right now butlichess-puzzles
will archive soon. - New bookminder goal,
wiz-of-earthsea
, for A Wizard of Earthsea, which finally came off library hold after 3 months waiting!
Posted a day late because of Mother’s Day yesterday, which is precisely the sort of reason I have calendial
set to turn orange, not red, on Sundays!
Derailments
I let inbox-zero
slip! I didn’t even notice when I did because I unplugged my home server (where my jmap adapter script runs) during the move and didn’t plug it in for a few days, so I plugged it in and immediately derailed. Completely legitimate, to be clear—I very absolutely didn’t get to inbox zero. It was at $0, so no real loss anyways. I did have to go into the graph editor and set it to go back to zero in a week, so that it doesn’t become inbox-three
.
Breaks
2023W20: The aforementioned post-mother’s-day break
2023W21–22: No breaks.
Changes and notes
-
journal
comes off its long break soonish and I find myself looking forward to it, so I’ll allow it to come off! I did ramp the commitment down from 4/wk (which was feeling stressful and untenable) to 2/wk, which will hopefully be a little calmer. - Finished A Wizard of Earthsea (man, what a good book!) and archived its goal. I’m reading the rest of the Earthsea books now, but not creating individual goals since I didn’t get them from the library but instead got the ebooks directly, so since there’s no book-specific timing constraints I can just let general
pages
push me forward. -
lichess-puzzles
has been archived and fully replaced withlichess-training
, which uses the new official Lichess autodata integration! It’s been working fantastically. - Tidied up my graphs for
journal
andnailtrim
, removing some extraneous breaks.
Breaks
2023W21–2023W22: No breaks.
2023W23: June 9–11, for my high school reunion. Which is only one day, but it’s going to take a whole day and throw my schedule off for about a day on either side.
Changes and notes
- Honestly, no changes! Things are good!
Derailments
I couldn’t bring myself to do any fiber arts yesterday, so I decided to let it derail—at $0, so it barely counts—and get some nice break time. I’m very pleased with this derailment, so I made the little badge green.
Breaks
2023W22: No breaks.
2023W23: Aforementioned high-school-reunion break.
2023W24: No breaks.
Changes and notes
- Urgency load is super high, which is a little surprising honestly, but indeed I’ve missed a couple of daily-upkeep style goals over the past handful of days, oops! Should be manageable—it’s certainly not feeling overwhelming, which is good.
-
journal
started back up at 2/wk, which I was nervous about, but it’s feeling comfy! - I noticed a (perhaps unsurprising) tendency to say “hmm, well, I missed bedtime by two minutes… might as well stay up until 3am!”, which is not great. So instead of making my goal be +1 for bedtime or +0 otherwise, I have a half-hour grace period where my score decreases precipitously but every minute still counts: in the half hour after bedtime, I get 0.5^{0.1\mathrm{min}+1} points where \mathrm{min} is the number of minutes late: 0.5 when late, halving every 10 minutes thereafter (gradually). If anyone has suggestions on alternate credit-breakdown approaches, that is welcome!