I added a bunch of breaks between then and now, focusing really hard on home renovation. Progress is good, but not done, but it’s time to get back on the horse, as it were: I’ve spent too long focusing entirely on home reno and not enough on other “basic upkeep” stuff.
That said, there’s also a bunch of changes I’m making to turn down non-reno stuff:
Changes and notes
piano and music are set to archive. I still like those things, but hobby time is getting pared down, and I like them less right this moment than other hobbies that are easier to pick up and put down in little bits.
sleepyhead bedtime is moved from midnight to 00:30 - I didn’t change what I was considering bedtime when we hit DST and that was a bit overenthusiastic.
cleaning is staying at 4 checklists per week but I will be very fuzzy with what I consider “done”. I have a vague intent to make a “during-reno cleaning list” that’s shorter but more precise but we’ll see if that happens.
slow-cleaning is dropping from 1 to 0.6 items per day.
weekly-review is keeping its name but is actually dropping to 1/14 per day slope.
rolochecks is going on archive. I’m perfectly okay drifting out of touch with some people while I work on reno. Also, I’ve been reasonably good about still reaching out to folks even over the past two months, so I’m not sure this is even still needed. Might come back!
I’ve moved my bedtime back to 00:45 from 00:30 - I just wasn’t quite able to make the earlier time happen. I’ll try again when I’m less busy! When it worked, it was nice, so I’m still gonna shoot for 00:30, but not have sleepyhead be so strict about it.
I’m trying a simpler calendial format, where I don’t mention breaks that aren’t coming up and I have less headers. I missed the urgency-load, tho, so that’s back.
Removing goals is good for urgency load, whoda thunk!
A near-derail this week on sleepyhead due to forgotten-to-update data, but luckily (a) it’s on Excuses Mode and (b) beeminder support is as lovely as ever and get me fixed right up!
I intended to get a a solid hour of two of fiber-arts at my local library’s craft night this week… but I ended up laid out with a migraine that day, so now I have an hour or two of knitting to catch up on! Woe is me.
No changes again! Probably soon — the kitchen is actually functional again, at long last!!! There’s still work to be done, but we have a sink, an oven, a cooktop, all our counters… so I expect to have some time to get back ahead on beems and start to ramp them back again Soon™. Exciting times!
I haven’t missed a day of flossing since recreating it. I suppose I ought to be grateful that it’s not actually hard, just needs that liiiiiiittle bit of nudging, I guess!
Kitchen is not done, but done enough that I am hereby ending my policy that “working sufficiently hard on the kitchen gets a point for cleaning and slow-cleaning”.
There’s still plenty of reno work to do, though, so I’m going to keep not bringing back any of my recently-archived “hobby” goals. Those are for comfy times!
Personally, I’ve never been able to maintain flossing without a goal either, no matter how easy it seems when the goal is there. I’m not sure how I should feel about that, but for the time being I’ve accepted it .
New goal! morning-routine, to fractionally or beenarily track when I do my whole morning routine. I’m still settling in exactly what that entails? But it’s going to be close to “brush teeth, yoga, breakfast, something outside (pool cleaning/testing or gardening)”. I’m also not totally positive if I want to allow fractional routine completions or if I want to require full completion for a point - for now, I have it at a 0.01 slope so there’s essentially nothing at stake, and will try tracking fractionals and see how it feels. More on this next week!
Indeed, it was! And a good focused week of working my colors back down has paid dividends—I’m even back to full Orange is the New Red! Extraordinarily satisfying. In fact, I’m going to bring a few things back up in frequency:
weekly-review is back to being, well, weekly, rather than fortnightly
morning-routine is settling in reasonably well. I’m going to go with allowing fractional and a very easy rate of 2/wk, slowly ramping it up as I get better at tracking & paying attention to it. Ratcheted it down to 8 days - I don’t mind having more than a week of safety buffer for now so I can fiddle with it and not worry about the horizon.
I’ve been mulling over the tension in some goals between having a “bare minimum” or “maintenance” rate, and a more-aggressive “get better at it” rate, which kind of want different pledge amounts. I might play around with setting up some meta goals in the next week or two to try that out! Of course, that only works on non-fractional goals where I want to put a +1 in both, but that’s lots of my beenary goals.
Is there a clear advantage to having both the maintenance and aggressive goals? I assume the idea is to put a larger pledge on the maintenance one so you are penalized more heavily for failing to meet it—but at the same time, probably if you’re coming anywhere close to the more aggressive one than you must be close to the maintenance one. I guess the concern is that if the aggressive one has a long respite on derailing then it might stop helping with maintenance, while if it had two short a respite then you could end up derailing on it a lot?
Recently I’ve been ramping up some of my goals gradually to try to “get better at it”, as you said. I haven’t written up a post about how I’m doing it yet, but my plan is that if I derail I will always just immediately drop the rate down to the last rate that I got through without ever derailing, if that makes sense. Not sure if that sounds appealing.
But maybe your solution is better. I guess the trick is what values of the respite and the two rates will make it so the maintenance goal is actually doing anything?
EDIT: sorry if the above is too rambly to be coherent lol
Right, long-respite-on-derailing is exactly my concern. As a concrete example, right now I’m consistently flossing just a bit under once a day. If I try to move that to twice a day, if I derail, I don’t actually want a break, I want to just go back to my current rate — which is exactly what you describe with “going back to the last rate that I got through without ever derailing”, except without me having to remember to go to the graph and remove my respite and adjust the rate.
So, for upsides, I’d say less manual work per derail; for downsides, I’d say having to duplicate goals and not working well for non-beenary goals — if I do it and it goes well, I’ll probably have to write a copy-raw-data-from-another-goal pollable integration, rather than the built-in metaminding of “+1 when other goal gets any data” for my fractional-supporting goals (like cleaning, another goal that I would like to ramp up but want any failures at the ramp to not result in a whole-ass break).
I had a long run of flossing daily without a goal, after most of a lifetime of never flossing (because it’s obviously an impossible contortion that my fingers will never learn!). I was helped by a BJ Fogg micro idea to reduce starting friction — ‘just one tooth’ — and chained it to my existing toothbrushing habit. Brush. Floss. Every time.
Then I fell off the waggon.
Now I’ve got a flossing goal, structured on something a dental hygienist said to me: skipping one day is ok, but after two days the plaques harden. So my Beeminder goal is set to something like 5/week and a 1 day autoratchet. Four years and counting! 10 derailments in all that time, apparently, but only 1 in the past year and 1 in the year before that.
I hardly ever miss a day now, but I’m erring on the side of keeping the goal going.
Morning routine ramping up to 0.5/day! Hoping to stabilize around, like, 0.8, but we’ll see.
OitNR lasted, like, two days this time I took a couple slow days, planning to attack my goals this weekend, and then immediately injured my foot and took some more slow days to rest up. No regrets, but the urgency load sure is going up. Luckily I’m almost all healed up, so I should be able to actually catch up this week.
Love the discussion from @poisson and @philip about two-mode goals! I still haven’t implemented anything here, but continue to think about doing it.
This is incredibly dumb, but since I was thinking of restarting my own calendial thread I was wondering how you make the little urgency load widgets (I could just make it by hand but I assume you have a more automated solution, since it looks like the github thingys)
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