@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!