House of Suns was excellent! I’ll probably get some other Reynolds books from the library.
Forgotten Beasts of Eld was also very very good! I’ve got another library hold waiting for me already. I don’t really remember what it is… but I’ll find out when I go soon!
Changes and Notes
Dialled knitting up from 1.5hr/wk to 1.75hr/wk—if I want to finish my cardigan in less than, like, three years, I’ll probably need to be hitting more like 3hr/week, eventually? But I’ll ramp my way up nice and gentle.
Ratcheted gym to 2 days — I finished a cycle of workout progression last week and need to start the next one and I know for sure that has enough ugh field that I won’t do it without the beeminder kick.
Flattened the historical breaks on inbox-zero to make the graph look nicer.
Ratcheted piano down to orange: I’m visiting parents this weekend and they have a lovely baby grand so I spent a lot of time yesterday practicing and playing and I’m going to do more today, so I’ll probably need to ratchet it again tonight!
The mysterious library hold was The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. It’s distressing, but excellent. I’ve got a library hold out on S.B. Divya’s Machinehood that caught my eye at Half-Price Books; it probably won’t be ready by the time I finish The Water Knife but that’s fine, I’ve got plenty of pages buffer.
Changes and Notes
Unarchived flossing: I archived it many moons ago because I was habitually flossing every day, but since I moved I haven’t stuck to it. So… goal’s back!
As I often do, ratcheted brushday and brushdark, as I often do. Upped their autoratchetMins as well to 5/wk.
I’ve been really good about keeping up with cleanspresso, so I had almost a week of buffer—ratcheted that down to 2 days as well.
And that’s it! Super light this week—everything is feeling really pretty well dialed.
My prediction that I’d finish The Water Knife before Machinehood came in at the library was accurate, but only by two days. I haven’t actually started the new book yet, even so, but the goal is up at machinehood.
Changes and Notes
Literally no changes! Anki is still doing fine but I’ve fallen behind on journalling recently and I think it was a useful habit when I was more active at it, so I’m more strongly considering a goal for it. As normal, if I’m still waffling by next calendial, I’ll make the goal.
Machinehood is the only book I have going right now. I started yesterday; good so far!
Changes and Notes
Yesterday I tried out using zzq’s extension[forum] to collapse goals as I did them, since autodata means I can’t totally trust the little checkmark icon (plus, “hide” is more visually impactful than “has a checkmark”). I got so much done! I’ll probably start doing that regularly.
As promised, journal goal ahoy! It’s not a very cute name but that’s okay. It’s beenary for “wrote a journal entry today”; autodial from 1 to 6 per week. I’ll write today’s entry right after calendialing.
We’ve been doing fantastic on cleaning, cleandish, and cleanspresso, so I ratcheted them all down to 2 days so we don’t skip the whole start of the week: my wife helps with house cleaning and dishes, of course, but the buck stops, as it were, with me, since my schedule is much easier to find time to clean in.
Machinehood is nearing its end; I’m nervous. It could easily go either way between “satisfying ends-tying-up action-packed conclusion” and… well, none of those things. I’ve purposefully not gotten another library book; I plan to next read sea-of-stars.
Changes and Notes
New goal! Toggl-tracked hamstring stretches. I had a beenary did-my-stretches goals a while ago but I’m taking a different approach this time around, aiming for less focused but more frequent stretches while I, e.g., watch youtube videos, or play games on my phone. Starting it small but with a large autodial max.
Small regular ratchets on cleandish, brushday, and flossing.
I continue to appreciate zzq’s extension. I’m planning to try to do a compact/extra-fancy display for beenary goals (“+1 for ‘did I do the thing today’”) that I’ll probably do as a fork off the extension. If it ends up being cool I’ll post it, but no promises on time or coolness
Machinehood was pretty good! A little rushed at the end—all the loose ends tied themselves a little too conveniently—but didn’t end up as tropey as I feared.
I’ve just started To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (sea-of-stars). It’s a whopping 878 pages, so at my “safe” rate of 5/day I’ll finish… next March. Probably I will read faster than that but if not that’s okay!
Changes and Notes
hamstring is successful and good! I’m stretching them right now while I type!
Small regular ratchets on brushday, brushdark, cleandish, cardio, cleanspresso, and flossing. I’ve been busy!
I accidentally set my journal goal to 2/day instead of 2/week; I fixed it but I’ve got to double-journal all this week. I decided to stick with it instead of emailing support (thanks, Discord!) and it’s actually been pretty surprisingly good! 2/day might be a little excessive for normal times but it seems to be a good way to kickstart the habit for now… I might actually stick with it, I’m not sure yet! It’ll go back to 2/week before my next calendial, so I’ll be update then about what I decided to do with the goal.
Considering making a goal to track completed puzzles on Lichess. Their API is really good so it would be pretty trivial to do.
piano has been feeling too-much, so I put it off and let it turn red, and then had a migraine the next day, but I let it ride since when I let it go red it sure felt derail-y, and I wanted a break anyways.
journal being set to 2/day was not sustainable, it turns out. Something like 10/wk is probably doable and maybe what I’ll ramp back up towards after the derail-break. It was a new goal at $0, so I especially didn’t mind just taking a week breather on the goal after overdoing it.
Bookminder
sea-of-stars has, slowly, been chugging along. Not much interesting to say about it yet—if that state continues next time, I’ll skip this section until there’s anything book-adjacent to say.
Changes and notes
I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed in general, so I scheduled a three day break for everything (except calendial, which I still want to be orange next Sunday) at the end of next week—I’ll take a little beeminder-vacation, build up some safety buffer or just ignore stuff, whatever feels comfier when I get there.
On a related note, I’m purposely not ratcheting any of the goals I normally ratchet this week. After my little break next week, I’ll see if I need to soften some of those ratchet requirements or slopes.
I did make a goal to track completed puzzles on Lichess at lichess-puzzles! I’m still fiddling with my script to sync data, so the goal itself is currently flat-forever while I get the script sorted. I should be able to ramp it up by next calendial!
Calendial’s a day late this week! I spent the weekend at the ACL music festival here in Austin. It was great fun, but while I was broadly able to keep up with my goals, calendialling fell through. No stress, though: that’s why orange is the new red!
Lichess puzzles are tracking very easily! I’ll make a new thread[forum] to dump my bash-blob in if anyone wants it. Potential for a new integration, maybe?
I’ve got my mentioned break coming up later this week. It’ll be nice!
I found that I was making up tasks to do during focusmates, rather than using focusmate as a tool for tasks I had to do anyways, which isn’t how I want to approach it. So I’ve just let focusmate derail and also scheduled it for an archive.
Changes and notes
I got covid at ACL! It was a moderate case at worst but I still ended up emailing support to extend my break, which is why I didn’t post anything last Sunday—I was rather busy being sick. I’m good now though!
Customary ratchets on brushdark and brushday.
I did a ton of knitting today and don’t quite want all the break it would give me, so I’m ratcheting that from 9 days down to 5.
Increased slope and ratcheted gtd.
Increased autodialMin for journal to 4/week—my 30d average is at 3/week right now and it feels a bit low.
It seems like my lichess-puzzles script is behaving well, so I’ve turned it from a flat-forever goal into a very achievable 1/day, and used graph.beeminder.com to make it as if there had always been a nice red line relative to where the data points are. If I end up having to ratchet this one frequently, I’ll probably turn on autodialling.
Tidied up my graph on inbox-zero, tightening some breaks (which, for a whittle-down, means “periods with a higher goal than normal”) down closer to the actual data so the graph looks nicer.
That’s why I’ve got a subscription-level slope set on my focusmate, i.e. 3/week, just to keep me from forgetting it exists as a tool altogether.
At least that’s how it started. In practice I’m using the Autodialer to commit to between 0.6 and 2 sessions per day, with weekends off and a 7-day autoratchet. Any more than 2 and it’d get swamped by a busy week and, like you, I’d find myself just clocking sessions to satisfy the goal.
Their monthly emailed receipts might also help with the forgetting, or maybe you don’t suffer from that particular challenge. There are loads of tools that I often don’t think to use, but always find helpful when I do. Focusmate is one of them.
…slow-cleaning: I procrastinated making my halloween costume (my wife and I are the Mouse and the Cookie from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie) and then had to spend six hours yesterday sewing. So I didn’t have time to do, uh, anything else.
Changes and notes
I’ve combined knitting and sewing into one fiber-arts goal, since they compete for time and also for hand health.
Ratcheted cleaning and slow-cleaning to 2 days—the full seven, this time, felt a bit much.
Scheduled books to archive: I’ve been relying on pages, which is autodata from The Storygraph, more.
I had support put a break on gym—my wife got sick and I felt it would be irresponsible to go to the gym when I was exposed to something fluish. I haven’t gotten sick yet, luckily, but I still think it was a good choice!
I wrote a userscript to cutely display beenary goals. It also replicates the “collapse” feature of @zzq 's extension, since my primary browser (qutebrowser[github]) can’t run firefox/chrome extensions, but does support (a subset of the features of) greasemonkey userscripts. I’m still testing it out and tweaking it, and I want to see if I can get it to work with zzq’s extension instead of just duplicate it, but… keep an eye on this space for more info!
I gave myself a bit of tennis elbow from too much typing with bad posture and then too much piano practice, so I have a break scheduled that starts on Thursday. One of my closest online friends is a PT so she recommended me some stretches and exercises and it’s doing fine enough to edge-skate the goal until then, so I probably won’t bother having support help. Besides, there’s plenty of right-hand work, sorting out fingering, and listening to recordings of the songs I’m working on that would count as “practice” and not aggravate my elbow at all.
Customary ratchets on cleanspresso, brushdark, and lichess-puzzles. brushday, somewhat embarassingly, doesn’t need a ratchet: since my wife was sick, I was sleeping in the office, but my toothbrush was still in the master bath, so my morning routine was all out of whack. This has been resolved!
I’ve been considering a beenary goal for anki-zero. Now that I’m in “maintenance mode” on my decks, I don’t have as much intrinsic “learning is fun!” motivation to keep up with it every day. As usual, unless I explicitly decide against it, the “not making a decision” decision will be to make the goal at my next calendial.
dont-starve, for tracking how many meals I eat. What counts as a meal is purposefully ill-defined but is somewhere around the “nutritiousish and I don’t feel hungry still after eating” line. I actually gained a couple pounds on my honeymoon, which was rather exciting, since I struggle greatly with gaining weight. One of the only meaningful differences I’ve been able to identify is that I actually had three full meals a day easily, since our hotel had a buffet. I didn’t think I was that bad about missing meals or having not-actually-enough-to-count meals, but maybe I am! We’ll see how the goal does.
I’ve been thinking about a way to track bedtime for a while, and my current attempt is sleepyhead: +1 if I’m pretty sure I went to sleep on time. If I’m up late (“phone in bed” counts as “up late”!) and look at a clock and notice it’s past bedtime, I explicitly go insert a 0. If I’m unsure, fall back to whenever Sleep As Android thinks I fell asleep. Like brushdark, the due date is noon the following day to give me ample time for data entry even if I allow the goal to go to True Red. Even so, I’m not entirely confident that I’ll be able to track this consistently, so while I trial it out it’s on a giant flat spot. Next calendial I’ll give it a slope and retroratchet it down if it’s still been working out!
Changes and notes
Userscript still pending, but I’m going to keep saying that here as a soft nudge to myself to not forget to go work on it. Worst case, it’ll stale until my coding goal finally gets back to orange, which is currently… 16 days away. If I haven’t gotten to it by the post-thanksgiving calendial, I’ll probably ratchet that down a little.
Related: I’m not ratcheting anything this week, because I don’t want to get confused with regards to my upcoming holiday break. I’ll deal with that next week, and enjoy my buffer for now!
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).
Retroedited the bright red line for anki-zero and sleepyhead 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, and sleepyhead 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 might give it another go in a while: when it worked well, it worked really well…