Camille's Beeminder Journal

[sheik]

sleep hygiene goal – technical details

On Android, I can probably make a Tasker thing that would send a +1 to Beeminder if my phone is being used between 11pm and 4am. Same thing with a script on my computer

Oh my god, I’m saying nonsense.
Well, it could send data somewhere. At 6am, a script checks the data; if I did not use any electronic device, I get a point.

Maybe this is already possible by leveraging RescueTime?

On the other hand; what if watch TV or go out? I feel like I should have a pessimistic presumptive anyway. So I should make the goal manually

[sheik]

getting my routine back

When I first arrived in the island, I found my routine super fast, and I was pretty happy everyday.
But now, I messed up my sleep schedule and I end up not being able to do anything that I like.
I need to get back to this way of living.

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I slept from 7:00 until 16:00.

I feel really depressed

There was a Jazz live I wanted to go to but I didn’t feel like it.

I want to work; but it’s the weekend; I shouldn’t!

I woke up at 5pm. And now I’m stuck between wanting to work, wanting to scroll on my phone, wanting to party… I want to do everything and nothing at the same time.

So, I just scroll on my phone.

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I just turned out my phone and got here to think a bit about what I should do

The plan

So, my plan, right now, is the following:

1. Put an alarm for 8am
2. Wrap up my day (Beeminder tasks, Complice weekly review, tomorrow’s to-do)
3. 8am: start my day super hard and loud

The scary Monday morning routine

I remember seeing this on my timeline:

(Yes, I am the stereotypical Gen Z Hubermann Church follower)

Checklist

• waking up 30mn earlier than normal:
• 30mn sunlight: Methylphenidate+book+bench on the shore
• 3mn cold shower: scary but I’ll try

I can do it

If that works, that could make for a good anchoring Beeminder goal. Will see

[sheik]

Some data from Exist that tells me that:

1. If I wake up early, I get 2 more hours of work done
2. If I get more work done, I gain 1 happiness point

–

[sheik]

OK, I didn’t do it fully. But I woke up 8 hours earlier than normal, so it’s already good progress.

I went and worked 4 hours. I tried going back to the office at 9pm (where I am now), but I cannot really focus… I don’t really feel like working right now. So I’ll just go home and call it a day

[sheik]

I CRACKED THE CODE

It’s 11am, and I’m at the rooftop of the office and pretty pumped up for work.

I’m doing my Complice X Beeminder X Basecamp “preparation”.

I’m going to head down in the true office to work once I’m done with the small tasks.

Pills aren’t magic.

I’ve tried it before…

With Modafinil, I would take a pill and roll in my bed just enjoying the dopamine rush; thinking tons of stuff in my head, tons of ideas but not actually doing anything.

With Ritalin, I wake up, but end up turning on my phone and scrolling on social media/checking mails. Not good.

Routine is magic

This morning, I separated my waking up in four stages I came up.

Each state = 10 minutes. Once I’ve done the thing, I can go back to bed and just enjoy the feeling of “being in my bed in the morning”. My watch’s snooze button is 10 minutes, so it’s pretty great.

1. Prepare the mind. I take a slice of bread + 15mg of Ritalin
2. Prepare the body. I put on some clothes
3. Get out of my room. I go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, put on perfume. (I go back to my bed after that)
4. Get out of the house. I put creams on my face to be beautiful (this is a critically underrated life-hack). I go downstairs; if I see people I want to talk with, I do, because it makes me happy. It’s OK if I miss the 10 minutes mark and spend a bit too much time here.

Starting from there, the lines are not well delimited yet…

5. Take a walk to get sun and steps.
6. Go to the office’s rooftop and organise the day (I’m here). It’s not so comfortable outside, so I get a natural time limit messing around with mails and stuff.
7. Go to the office with a clear programming target (goal is deep work to get started the day)

… work …

8. Stop working when I leave the office… No work at home.

Let’s see how the day goes…

[sheik]

IT WORKED!!!

My routine works well; it even transposed to my home even though it would be better if I had a coworking space.
I have worked more in two days than I do in two weeks combined
(yes, I did not work that much before)

[sheik]

Today I’m here to say that I’m impressed how Complice, Beeminder, and now, 37signals, have changed my life for the best.

my super stack

1. Complice - live intentionally
2. Beeminder - hold your life together!
3. Beeminder form - improve the holding your life together part
4. 37signals/Basecamp - work doesn’t have to make you crazy
5. Methylphenidate - well, lol, just being able to do stuff

me without the CBBM stack

1. Didn’t get ADHD diagnosis
2. My room is a mess
3. Doesn’t help around the house
4. Didn’t pick up music again

me with the CBBM stack

1. Got ADHD diagnosis
2. My room is tidy and my bed sheets are way more regularly allergen-free (btw, beeminder made me buy non-allergenic bed sheets, so one good point for beeminder again )
3. I help around the house (well; I need to fix the goal, but it worked really well and I’m sure I can replicate it)
4. Slowly picking up music again!

[sheik]

Android Stack To Be Happy

While searching for an app that sends me random notifications, I found interesting stuff:

• apps to send quotes
• guided meditation sessions with themes
• FreeCBT, an app to do CBT on your phone

I’m super excited about FreeCBT. I’ve been meaning to learn it but I was too lazy to pick up a book. Watching a YouTube video + this app should be enough

my problems

<decided to cut’n’paste this into my notes instead>

self-help is not well regarded in France

(just morning ramblings, feel free to read if you’re interested in why french people do not consume self-help stuff)

I’ve been pretty repulsed by this kind of self-help stuff, because it’s kinda frowned upon in my culture. But also secretly attracted to it. There is something wrong about being open about using self-help content, in my mind. This is definitely a cultural thing; I’ve witnessed multiple 1st and 2nd gen immigrants not giving a fuck about listening to a cringe self-help podcast on full volume in their room. I absolutely despise this behaviour in my primitive french culture brain, it’s a physical body-level thought. It’s getting less intense, though.

But I also admire this, because it takes courage to go through the whole process that leads to you consuming this kind of content; and also, I’m amazed to see that they don’t have this mental “safety net”. Such freedom.

It’s 100% cultural. I’ve noticed this “software” in other native french people. “Attavisme” is a word that refers to this kind of internalized thought processes that get passed down from generation to generation without realizing it. My neighbors has amazing knowledge about these “attavismes”, so I’ll ask him next time if he knows the origin of our self-help allergy.

On the other hand, it seems to be getting less and less intense with time. People’s view of self-help are getting better; starting with accepting to go to a therapy session.

I’ve noticed that this mind-block is also less prevalent in richer people; did they unblock their mind; or were they not affected in the first place?

I’m 100% sure I’m not generalizing my own experience, since there definitely a huuuuge trend of people getting more into self-help. I think we even got our own guided meditation app a few years ago; there’s definitely an increasing demand.

Are we getting more self-aware?

So mysterious…

[sheik]

Note to myself: do not make big posts about random stuff

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I started a “stop_work_early” goal to avoid situations where I work until 2am. It worked today. (the limit is currently midnight)

I’m playing with the idea of a “shutdown_phone_now” to avoid procrastinating too much on my phone like last night, where I went to sleep at 7AM (what the hell?!)

[sheik]

New idea:

I should remember and repeat: what works for me
Instead of doubling down on: what should work for me

[sheik]

Spring cleaning

I feel very cluttered in my day-to-day life, so I’ve started to minimalise it.

Today, I’m refactoring my Beeminder goals. I’m going to remove all that is not super essential to me, to start from a clean plate.

Archiving these!

• mh_guitar: my current beeminder usage pattern does ont allow me to really use it well (same for mh_opz and beegaset)
• mh_instagram: Time usage is not a good indicator of Instagram addictive behaviors… Instagram is useful to me to some extent. Posting pictures, seeing pictures of friends… I’ll monitor the problem and find other solutions
• no_alcohol: would be better as a do_less goal to have pessimistic presumptive. Worked a couple of times, but this form makes it hard to use. I’ll recreate it one day
• nono: goal to use my robot cleaner. It’s a bit of a burden right now, and I can catch when I need it with the sleep journal (allergies)
• stop_work_earlier: not necessary since I started using SkedPal
• familycare: too generic

Keeping these:

• turn_off_phone: forces me to “turn off” my phone before 2am. I feel like I use more of this one
• acarizax: bitter medicine. One of the most important goal of my collection.
• tidy_room: essential for me to not live in a terrible muss
• brushmyteeth: ashamed of this one
• exist: adding data to exist
• ankizero: essential to not burn out of anki
• check_calendar: essential to not miss events
• two_pages: forces me to read two pages per day.
• read_htbs: just me brainwashing myself with Sam Altman’s iconic post every week
• gratitude: I like it
• process_letter: this is the reason why I am able to pay my taxes
• whole_day_intention: intention seems to be super important, I want to keep experimenting with them
• tag_check_health, bee_check_health: important to make sure that servers are still up and running
• walk: reminds me to stay active, from time to time.
• intentions: reminds me to write my complice intentions. Keeps me in the loop
• improve_room: makes my room more pretty, so I’m keeping it. Maybe it should be renamed to “decorate_room”.
• check_plants: avoids them from dying, so keeping this.
• wash_clothes, avoids terrible cloth shortages
• declutter: doesn’t hurt
• zuck (post photo on insta every week): it actually works very well for what I intended it for. (imposed Anki for my friends, so that they don’t forget me xD). I just wish I was taking a bit more interesting pictures some days… Maybe this could be a candidate for a new goal, to take one “instagramable” picture a day?
• learntobeemind: I still feel like learning more about Beeminder from the help center
• tag_check_backups: crucial so that we don’t loose our data
• check_backups: crucial so that I don’t loose my personal data.
• readwise_review: good to remember stuff I highlighted from research papers
• bee_calendialing: crucial to put breaks on beeminder

I want to change these

• prepare_meds: makes waking up the next day easier… Maybe I could convert it to a “prepare_tomorrow_morning” goal?
• metastar: asks me to do one “meta” thing every day on Complice. This biases me toward making changes, but I’d like to couple this with reflection more, to create important goals instead of gimmicky ones (one Beeminder goal has some cost of implementation, and sometimes, deleting a goal is better than creating a new one) (also it’s hard to define what should count toward this goal)
• reflect: asks me to write in a notebook every day. It’s cute, and it worked fine for the first few days, but I lost the value of it. At first, I really reflected, but now, I do it more to get beeminder in green. A more involved form of journaling inside Obsidian seems more appropriate. I just found a “word count + Beeminder” plugin for Obsidian. That should do the trick
• anki_cards: This counts all anki cards, no matter their nature. I’m going to create a goal called “anki_recording”, with a list of card types to create. e.g. one thing about computers, one thing about a friend, one funny statistic… It’s a pain to count the number of Anki cards that I add
• freshbed: would be better to lump everything together in a “cleaning day” instead of having many small beeminder goals
• write_dreams: stopping this for 1.5 month to see how I feel about it

[sheik]

Future refactoring

• group some goals together through Tasker tasks

[sheik]

Week review

Hello, this is the result of my week review. I spent about 3 hours on it. I took break for it to be super effective

Meta improvements to implement for next week

• Follow a new method for taking breaks (52/17)
• SkedPal idea: rework my categories: EMERGENCY, MUST HAVE, NORMAL, NICE TO HAVE
• Freelancing: weekly priority setup check-in
• Time organization: Monday is the day where I’m super meta. I prepare my week. Even if it takes 4 hours for my weekly review!
• Ask (this person) how he organizes his days, to stealth his productivity techniques
• Remove all notifications from my smart watch

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• TAG: dedicate two hours a week to “go faster”. This could be refactoring, taking time to deeply reflect, things like that…
• Freelancing: DX improvement 2 hours
• URLMinding “gofaster”
• Record my mood/performance during the day. I would like to have an “event trail” that lists different events of my day, so I can make an accurate estimation of my mental capacities, which will allow me to better plan my hours of activity.
• Stop using the phone during my work day → how to implement this systematically?

[sheik]

Something interesting happened…

I have a goal that “forces” me to use a musical device.

I really didn’t want to do it, but paying 30$ is too much… so I used it. But now that I did, I figure out that I really enjoying. So, I’m cancelling the archival of this goal. In fact, I will even make this goal super regular so that I start integrating it into my routine

[sheik]

Week review

I have started creating a “personal rules” Obsidian document, where I put general rules that I must remember to myself to take decisions.

I also noticed that I don’t spend enough time improving the speed of my software development practices; I do not spend enough time improving my tooling, which wastes time in the long run. I want to deliberately invest in this area

There is also a gig that I’m ignoring; I’m starting to think about scheduling a whole day for it

[sheik]

Decluttering even more

I’m derailing most of my goals right now.

I figured out that it’s better for me to have a few well-targeted beeminder goals than a ton of them
(the money loss starts to register).

Guidelines for choosing good Beeminder goals

1. You don’t mind about the pledge going up exponentially
2. It doesn’t take too much time
3. You procrastinate on it
4. Doing it really enhances your life

Another way to think of it is a “budget” of Beeminder goals.

You can only have so much Beeminder goals before it makes your life too heavy, so you have to carefully pick the ones you really want to do.

The rest is better to be set as a reminder or a calendar event.

[sheik]

I just keep declutering

Having too many Beeminder goals put a lot of stress on me.
Having too much expectation of myself too

The same goes for having too many customers, project, whatever.

My goal now, is to declutter my life.

I want to make it dead simple.

I want to sleep in the grass while listening to chiptune music.

I don’t want to have crazy obligations anymore

I don’t want to work crazy hours anymore

I just want peace, purpose, fulfilment, focus, pleasure, learning

And also, I have to improve systems

Because I was so caught up in the day-to-day, I couldn’t invest time in process improvement.

I mean, improving my company, improving the way I work with my boss/customer.

This can only happen if there is a dedicated time for experimenting and messing around.

No need to be someone else

I’m already cool enough; I managed to survive with my good points even though I poorly exploit them

I don’t need to follow the same path as the person I admire; my own will be as good, if not better. Comparing doesn’t matter anyway; only my subjective sentience experience matters.

But I will still be inspired

[sheik]

Yes, I really think that what matters is the subjective experience of life, in the first place.
Life should be pleasant; my job should be to maximise the overall pleasantness of life.
I’m currently trying to optimise it over a very long-term horizon by working hard early in life,
but I’m starting to realize that it’s not efficient since I largely over-estimate the risk of having a short life as well as “not having learned to be happy” young enough, which compounds over time