2023W49: 12-03 – 12-07 break continues as planned. Still not locked in, so I might dial the break away if the plans fall through. Hopefully not! And then, from the 10th…
2023W50: …through the 17th for a ski trip!
Changes and notes
Between some safety buffer and some breaks, my urgency load is a little silly-low at the moment. Calendials will become sporadic through the holidays.
gtd archive has landed.
On a related note, one really big change: I’m setting must-do to archive. A staggering amount of my must-do entries have been things like “one item from priority-list” for a good while—we’re pushing “administrative tedium” rather than, y’know, useful list. It was one of my best, most useful goals for a long time, so I feel weird retiring it, but my to-do list practices have sort of outgrown it. Weird, but nice!
2023W51: Christmas-hosting break, no changes there.
2023W52: End of Christmas break; nothing following.
Changes and notes
seasonal-goals is finished! Four whole seasons. I’ll probably do a little writeup in my other thread for that about how it went. Summer and fall were kind of middling.
So many breaks (and thus so little urgency load) means I don’t have much to do here.
As I come out of the holiday season, which meant nearly a month off beeminder, there’s a bunch of goal changes I’m making in reflection of how it went.
Setting a stop to brushday and brushdark. I’ve tried this before when I felt like I was cruising along and ended up needing to bring the goals back, and I don’t mind if that happens again, but I don’t think I missed any brushes this month. I’ll keep flossing around, though, that’s still less automatic.
gym is on another month-long break, while…
…I increase focus on cardio, ramping it up to 4/wk but trying for 5/wk. If that’s sustainable I’ll increase the slope again in the future, if not, no stress.
spanish is on a month’s break while I look for new practice strategies - I’d been primarily using Busuu and it was good for a while but is becoming annoyingly Spain-spanish focused. When it comes back, I’ll get points for “tried out a new thing, even if I don’t feel like I strictly learned any spanish from that thing yet.” Possibly trying out some spanish-language fiction books I already like and already broadly understand?
My side project goal, endoscreen, is in a good steady state right now, so I’m archiving that goal since I still don’t really have anything to do for it at the moment. I’ve got a few days still on the hook, there wasn’t that much safety buffer, so I’ll focus up on documentation and handover docs for future-me a bit.
I don’t feel like gratitude has, honestly, been all that helpful recently? When I started tracking it closely it was very helpful for general mood, so I feel weird sending it away, but… I think it’s done what it needed to, and I don’t need such close tracking here anymore. Definitely another one that I expect to want to bring back somewhen in the future though!
I’ve found myself really wanting more meditation time but not feeling like I have the activation energy for it, so, uh, hello bemminder, ramp that one right up. Gentle ramp for now to make sure I actually want that, not just want-to-want that.
Related: yoga is back, for the umpteenth time. I have no really good plan for how it’s going to go better this time except hope, which is generally not a great strategy. Except I turned on notifications from Down Dog, a yoga app I really like, so this is kind of also Beemind-What-You-Buy-ing? Fingers crossed. For how much I really genuinely enjoy doing yoga, you’d think it’d be easier to keep up a regular home practice.
brushday, brushdark, endoscreen and gratitude stops have landed. I haven’t missed a brush yet, and it’s been a weight off my shoulders not worrying about having to track it! So far so good.
I’m doing a 30-day yoga challenge so the goal isn’t super useful right now but that’s ok! It’s helping with meditate too, at least. I’ll ratchet it down when the challenge is over.
I’ve been playing more chess, which means I have brain space for more puzzles, so I’m ramping aggressively from 1.75 puzzles/day to 3. That’s still not that many, overall.
cleanspresso is another opne, like brush*, that I feel has outlived its usefulness: I feel like I’ve finally broken the habit of not cleaning up. As with the rest, if the problem crops back up, so too will the goal!
My yoga challenge continues, and continues being nice. I’ve gone ahead and graph-edited it in so I’m not building up months of safety buffer, just a week or so. I’d previously intended 1.6 sessions a week, but that sounds really rough to drop down to, honestly, so I’ve put it at 3. I’ll see how the first week of February goes, but I’m kinda thinking maybe 5?
Considering a beenary priority-progress groal to replace my old must-do that, by its archival, was just “do a task from the priority tag in gtd” for days on end… but not totally convinced it super needs beeminding just yet. I’ll continue to mull this one over. I won’t precommit to making it if undecided next calendial, but I will precommit to writing down more thoughts next time, at the very least.
books is way ahead but I’m happy with that, so no changes planned, but I’ve got my eye on it if this rate continues. Precommit: if I’ve got 26 books (half my goal) read by April 1 (a quarter of the year), I’ll scale my goal to 78 books this year. If I’m even one short or a day late, no change necessary, but permitted.
gym and spanish are coming off their “i don’t want to deal with these yet” breaks soon. No firm conclusions, but more info coming next calendial: “decide what to do with them” is on my next set of priority-list tasks.
Yoga challenge is done and I’ve got a nice gentle week of buffer out of it. Neat!
Still undecided on priority-progress, leaning towards towards making it with a zero slope but still tracking, just to get a more objective sense of where I’m at right now. Will do that next time if I haven’t decided against it for some good reason.
“Kick the can down the road another week” on both gym and spanish. On the former, I have some rather exhausting house-reno projects happening; on the latter, a little translation project. So I don’t have to make big decisions yet! Maybe solutions will continue to fall into my lap?
Considering a slow-chess goal that requires rapid or slower games, but i’m feeling very waffley, so nothing yet.
My urgency load has been trending steadily eepwards, so I think I either need to focus harder on doing things or have shallower roads. For this week, I’m trying “do things” but we’ll see how sustainable/good it feels. I’m hoping this is the sort of problem where simply noticing it makes it go away.
I have decided to wait to create priority-progress, and slow-chess, because…
“Do things better” did not, broadly speaking, work, and I’m still feeling on the edge of overwhelmed. So after some consideration, I’m giving fiber-arts and piano and music month-long breaks while I focus on other hobbies like reading and woodworking. They’d gotten to the point of “mandatory fun” rather than “helping me overcome activation energy”, so, ta-ta for now! I actually put in fiber-arts shortly after last calendial, so that’s already in effect, which is the only reason my urgency load is lower than last week.
I’ve been treading water just fine on bottlefill, but that’s not getting any buffer built up, so I’m dropping the slope from 2 bottles/day to 1.5 so I can get a bit of safety on it.
spanish derailed for $0, which I feel silly about, so the badge is yellow. I meant to go to the library and get a children’s book in spanish to work through, and forgot until after they closed, and instead of doing anything else I just mentally uncled out of it. It was at $0 though so I don’t feel that bad, although I do wish I could have literallyuncled out of it[forum]—but alas. It was about time for me to ping @dreev somewhere and beg for it again anyways!
Breaks
2024W07–2024W10: No breaks planned.
Changes and notes
Oh gosh, stopping those hobby-goals was so helpful. I’ve finally been able to get back on top of OitNR[blog], a task at least two months in the making, modulo long breaks. I didn’t stop that many goals, but just enough to free up enough mental space to Do Things.
Accordingly, no new goals or adjustments: I’m luxuriating in “feeling comfy”. I haven’t forgotten about priority-progress and slow-chess, though; in re: the former, I’m working on jailbreaking my old kindle to use as a display for my priority list, though I fear it might be on too old a firmware for the particular mod I was planning on using. We’ll see.
@poisson will be pleased (or at least startled into his own action) that I stumbled across my TAPs[forum] page in my notes, all of which I’d completely forgotten, but the review for which I’ve now put in my weekly-review checklist (for which the rest of: see below). My Sapience Spell—triggered when I scratch my nose or crack my knuckles—came back immediately; my “pick up floss after putting down toothbrush” goal apparently successfully became so habitual I forgot it was once a thing I had to teach myself to do, which is heartening, and my “trim my beard when I feel the shower water and it’s not hot enough” TAP is obsolete because my bathroom is now the closest room to the water heater so it will never have a chance to trigger. Any suggestions for new triggers to attach to "tidy up scraggly beard hairs " are welcome!
Weekly Review Checklist
To head off the obvious question “what is ‘review TAPs’ alongside, exactly?”, my weekly review goal has me
Gather inputs from browser tabs
Gather inputs from journal
Check on any waiting-fors (I use some dataviewjs[github] blocks in Obsidian to automate detecting Project files that have active tasks in their Waiting For category)
Consider every someday/maybe and discard stales or promote to active projects
Process inputs to bugs/actions/projects/do-immediately
Empty “Project without actions” (another dataviewjs block)
Scan actions for stales & completes
Check in on [[TAPs]] (which links to the TAPs page that I stumbled across that prompted this update).
This checklist lives in the same file in Obsidian as the references dataviewjs blocks as well as a massive block that pulls together all the Next Actions from all my project files and categorizes them.
Ah. Yeah, I too forgot that I had once dreamed of making TAPs “a thing”. The sapience spell actually might still work—it was attached to a watch I haven’t worn in a while, so it’s possible that if I do, it’ll come back. I’ll give it a try. The others I attempted, I don’t even remember, I’ll have to start over.
As for the beard trimming… I’ll just say something in discord, since this is going to end up being an actual conversation.
cardio, for $5. It was a hectic week and I was rather exhausted—not an excuse, but makes it feel more like a “tax” derail than a “punishment” derail. Neat!
Breaks
2024W09–2024W12: No breaks planned.
Changes and notes
Urgency load is pretty steady around 70, which makes me think I should put something else on a break. I’ve picked hamstrings, which is largely covered by yoga — I’m not sure the extra specific time is doing much.
Journalling is also getting a month’s break, because I’ve noticed my last several entries have been rather perfunctory. I’ve had some excellent entries, in the past two or three weeks that were helpful for working through some thoughts, so I’m not sending the goal away entirely, just stepping back from the schedule a bit.
fiber-arts is back and the break was nice and I’m feeling motivated about it again!
piano and music are also (nearly) back and I’m not feeling as positive about them, so instead they’re actually on break again.
I decided I should have just archived hamstrings instead of putting it on break, so that’s scheduled now.
The extra reduction in hobby-ish goals has felt very comfortable, and I’ve been able to really push ahead on cleaning- and maintenance-style goals, so I might do some more archiving or slope reductions coming soon, but I’m gonna let the current sitch bake at least another week before I make more decisions (other than about hamstrings).
2024W11–2024W14: No breaks planned. W15 will have one, I think!
Derailments
Non-legit called on nailtrim, because I did it and it’s not set to no-excuses
Legit derailment on slow-cleaning for $10! We went out with friends to a SxSW show and didn’t get home until 3am and I had to pick something to not finish before we left because I ran out of time. Not stressed about it!
Changes and notes
fiber-arts is back and I’m cool with that, but as I mentioned last time I probably would, I’m cutting it down to 30min/week.
I somehow got my break-looking off by one, and actually the upcoming break is W16, not W15, so a boring update today:
2024W13–2024W15: No breaks.
Changes and notes
gym, cardio, and yoga all seem to be on comfortable rates! I’ve noticed that I’ve been feeling very comfortably active for a little while now, not being too sedentary but not feeling like I’m overdoing it. Nice.
The aforementioned reduction in hobbyish goals has led, as predicted, to a lovely push in cleaning & life-maintenance goals! Plus we have an absolutey ton of work coming up for home renovations, so easing off on the ol’ beems is definitely good.
