@poisson here’s today’s! I manually edit in the number and color. I do something like <40 green, <60 yellow, <80 orange, >=80 red, but ofc you can pick any colors and thresholds that make sense for you Every time I make a new post, first I Edit the previous one and copy out the badge image shape so I don’t have to actually remember the format or anything.
morning-routine dialed up to 0.6/day and ratcheted to a week
madebed ratcheted to a week
flossing dialed up to 0.9/d and ratcheted to a week
I was out of town this weekend for a short-notice funeral, so I had support stick a break on everything for a few days (thank you! <3) — those three goals are the ones that I didn’t actually need the break for so ratcheting them back into place now! Pleased with my progress towards greens over the past few days. We have friends coming over tomorrow night and they tend to stay late, which is completely welcome but does mean I need to get my goals prettied up ahead of time!
Recent ramp-ups are comfy! I took this week off work to do some reno work and some tailoring for the outfits my wife and I are wearing to a wedding this Saturday, so keeping up with the beems has been pretty easy overall.
The only problem I’ve run into with this much safety buffer is forgetting to enter data and then having to remember what I did over the past couple days when the goals eventually edge into orange! A good problem to have (but still annoying enough that I might try to figure something out. A pessimistic-presumptive something that requires me to enter some data, even if it’s 0s, for some number of goals? dunno.)
Another option is trying to form the habit of looking through the whole goal list before bed, minimizing them one at a time, or something. Not sure if that’s easier or harder than the PPR idea.
This post is submitted after the deadline, but I did all the actual calendialing and break-checking already, just taking a while to get my thoughts together here, not to worry~
Urgency load is almost back where I like it! books is one of the harder ones to push, which has me mulling over what the heck to do with it. There’s two things I care about:
(a) Reading 52 books this year, a challenge I signed up for on Storygraph
(b) Reading some every day or two, reasonably consistently, so I don’t get surprised with “finish a whole book today or get stung” deadlines
(c) Not be so annoyed by data-entry that I get an ugh field
In the past, I tried
Individual per-book goals to odometer my pages; annoying to set up, but did well at (a) and (b). The annoyance was sadly great enough to not satisfy (c).
Single fractional[blog] books goal, with hand-calculated precise percentages through. Did well at (a) and (b), but sufficiently annoying to hand-calc that I didn’t succeed at (c) here, though it was better than the previous iteration.
Separate book and pages goals. pages is tracked through storygraph, which is very nice, but it takes ratcheting when I read big books to not fall off into unhelpfulness, which is precisely the state it’s in, because it’s annoying to figure out how much just how much to ratchet, so I never do it, so I may as well not have it. This is the best so far at (c), but i’m not getting any of the benefit of the pages goal, so it’s really just an integer do-more for books read, which is not working for goal (b).
For my next iteration, I’m currently planning on continuing to ignore the pages goal (it’s good data-tracking, at least), switching back to a fractional books goal, but allowing myself to be as squishy as I want with the progress estimates, and seeing how that does… but if anyone else has ideas to structure these beems better to track my real-world goals, please let me know!
I assume that you have some considerations why the following option isn’t optimal either… but since you haven’t mentioned it and you are asking for ideas, I want to mention that I had a goal to this end at some point which was a continuously running odometer goal, where I would reset odometer between books. Way back when, I came up with an idea how to enter the data if the actual text in a book starts not on page 1 (e.g. preface to skip). So this removes the annoyance to set up individual goals for each book.
I haven’t tried this integration myself, so I am wondering how it works. Do you mean you need to ratchet after a longer book because the pages are posted only on the day when you are finished and you get a large buffer after that? Is it also like that if you “track progress” daily (or every day when you do read) in the “currently reading” list? Because as far as storygraph’s own stats graphs are concerned, pages are shown on correct days if progress is tracked daily, but I am not sure if that’s also what they send through integration. But maybe it’s also too much friction to enter the progress there daily. (I sometimes find that overwhelming, especially since I am also using goodreads simultaneously and track everything in both places + copy reviews to a stand-alone blog).
Now that I have a storygraph-sourced pages goal, that’s probably better for pages specifically since it takes no extra effort to track (assuming that I also want my storygraph reading journal up-to-date, which I do) — but the only reason I didn’t do that previously is that I didn’t see your thread, or I totally would have! That’s a great looking strategy.
ratcheting
I explained myself awfully. What I mean is: if I want to use the pages goal to encourage me to read consistently, rather than waiting for books to have a red day, I need to either have the rate so high that it encourages me to keep up with Oathbringer (1248 pages), but then that rate requires me to finish The River Has Roots (144 pages) in a day, even if books is perfectly happy with spending a week on it — or be fine with a short novel, but then when I do finish Oathbringer, I have days and days of built-up safety buffer on pages that I need to ratchet away if I want it to keep prompting me with urgency. The latter case is where I am right now, except I haven’t done the ratcheting, so I have, uh, 10 months of buffer on pages right now.
(This example is not hypothetical; those are the two most recent books I’ve read)
I took this week off work for my birthday and for election stress management (and boy
has there been plenty to manage!) which has been excellent for my beems! This is maybe
the lowest my urgency load has ever been? I’m not going to scroll back through this
thread to check that. At any rate—things are excellent on the beemo front.
A mention by @dreev in the Discord about Mark Forster’s “Final Version” task management system (which Danny keeps meaning to publish a bee-blog post about, prod prod) prompted me to do more of that in my pocket notebook, which has been extremely comfortable for small tasks. I’m not really sure why I ever stopped!
The illustrious @mad , in discord, shared her reading-tracking strategy:
what i do with storygraph and really enjoy is i have two goals: a pages goal and a meta goal that looks to see if the pages goal updates. goal 1 forces me to read “volume” and goal 2 forces me to read “often”
This is so obviously good I feel silly for not having thought of it! I now have a pages-meta goal. Wahoo! I will probably retire books next year, but I’m keeping it through the end of the year, since it’s my put-my-money-where-my-mouth-is goal for a Storygraph challenge. (Alternatively, I’ll do another challenge next year, and convert the existing goal to a storygraph-sourced one, which we’ve just gotten the functionality to do!)
In other news, urgency load is a bit up, mostly due to sleepyhead — I’ve had terrible trouble going to sleep on time the past week or so, a combo of my normal routine being messed up and my wife having an unusually high number of consecutive (night) shifts. Manageable, though!
Turns out being on a break is good for urgency load!
No changes, but I do want to note that pages-meta existing has been precisely what I was looking for and I’m way ahead on my book goal for the whole year now as a result!
Wind and Truth is coming out soon and I’ll certainly be picking it up, so pages and pages-meta are about to get a lot of data. They’ll need ratcheted, but I’ll wait until I finish the read!
I’ll need to make a standalone goal for The Power Broker, which I meant to read along with 99% Invisible’s series on it, but instead both the book and the podcast episodes have just been stacking up for months.
morning-routine ramped up from 0.6/d to 0.7/d, as I’ve been getting more consistent.
Gonna be out of town for a bit tomorrow but it shouldn’t impact many goals since it’s short enough, so I didn’t put a break in on purpose, but urgency load is definitely up a bit as I prepare for it and will probably still be elevated next week. Coming from 18 means I have plenty of wiggle room, luckily!
New morning routine rate is definitely finally actually noticable, so I’m gonna wait another week of it before deciding if I want to ramp harder of it feels stable here.
Wind and Truth was great No bespoke goal for the Power Broker yet, but I hereby declare that I can’t post next calendial, and thus can’t get my +1, until I make it!
The Power Broker goal ahoy (power-broker), at a somewhat aggressive 30 pages a day, since I hope to finish by February. We’ll see if I can keep up! I’m hoping that extra holiday time will make it doable. That’d be a rather low rate for a cushy fiction book, but this is a dense biography.
Breaks are all in for the holidays and I’m looking forward to them!
A handful of derails recently: gym back on Dec 7, which I forgot to mention here, and cleaning and journal on the 15th. Completely legit, and rather silly: one of the cleaning subtasks was to put fresh sheets on the bed, which my wife and I did, and then immediately climbed into and fell asleep. Whoops! Maybe I shouldn’t leave red goals for the last ten minutes of the day? Nah…
morning-routine is getting “sort dirty laundry” added; sleepyhead is contracting way down in terms of partial-score period, as a tryout: one minute late will be 0.5, as current, but then losing 0.1 every subsequent minute.
Been a bit! My wife and I were quite sick for about a week, so early on I had support smoosh some breaks into everything for me. Thanks, support! <3
I’ve archived madebed — making the bed is a component of morning-routine, so it’s annoying to double-enter. I’m keeping yoga around though, even though it’s a part of mornings too, since (a) I do it in the not-mornings more often and (b) looking at its dots makes me happier than madebed. I don’t actually intrinsically care about the bed being made, I just hate when I’m tired and want to crawl into bed and the sheets are all tangled up, so that graph doesn’t really do much for me on its own.
weekly-review is going on archive for at least a bit. I don’t feel like it’s been working that well, across a few different cadences, so I’m going to take a step back and think more about how I’ve been actually using my to-do and input and project lists recently.
sleepyhead tight time limit continues apace. The goal is for me to get more 1s and it’s worked so far, but of course there’s a conflating factor of being sick and exhausted for a chunk there. But I still hope it’s a good idea.
As I come out of being sick, I continue to feel confident about the stricter sleepyhead. Nice!
power-broker at 30p/day has been tough to keep up with but just barely holding! That’s a good chunk of buffer, though. Big ups to beeminder for, as always, helping me actually finish the things that I say I want to.
We had a baby! Thanks to support for putting up with my non-legits and "ahhhhh help we had a baby please put a break"s. He arrived three weeks before his due date so I hadn’t put in any of what would have been my calendial-scheduled breaks yet T~T
Many changes, accordingly:
sleepyhead is archived for now
cleandesk is on 6mo break while I’m on parental leave from work
cleaning and slow-cleaning are dialed easer
morning-routine is dropped down to just making the bed and brushing my teeth for a few weeks while we figure out our anything routine
gym is archived for now, though I’m keeping cardio - I’m not getting enough sleep to be able to recover from a serious workout in anything resembling a reasonable time. Once we get a routine established, I’ll bring it back, but for now I’m stable with just regular cardio and yoga.
I think that’s it? Expect more changes, of course, to come!
Things are going really well with the baby—knock on wood it stays that way!
I got a Withings scale! Accordingly, a new weight goal is here. It’s entirely informational, so it allows 20lb fluctuation and has a $5 pledge cap: I just want the graph. And because I want the graph…
weigh-in, a meta goal for weight, requiring a weigh-in every other day.
sleep is going surprisingly well (not amazing, but decent), so gym is back at 3 workouts per week, with a fresh geneous definition: “beenary days picking a weight bar off the ground”, viz., at least one rep of an actual holding-a-weight exercise. My intention is to do more like 4 a week, one good workout per major lift, with accessories eventually, but… it’s okay if I’m not up for it!
I’ve been finding it really really hard to track bottlefill so I need to think about a better method of noting that i’m filling my bottle or finding a slightly different metric or something, but… for now it’s set to archive so it’s less annoying.
morning-routine doesn’t have laundry in it anymore because baby’s generating enough laundry to do that it’s not hard to notice that it’s laundry time anymore—but the other two parts (cleaning the pool and doing yoga) are back, since they’re feeling pretty well consistent again. I might split this into morning- and daily-routine goals or something but for now i’m just fine if I finish, e.g., pool cleaning, after lunch.
Every time I make a new post, first I Edit the previous one and copy out the badge image shape so I don’t have to actually remember the format or anything.
