I’ve been enjoying reading other people’s Beeminder journals, so I thought it was time to start one of my own!
A little background on my life: I’m the mom of a 6-year-old; I work and my husband stays at home. Right now I’m working a lot less, because I’m going through treatment for breast cancer. (I share that not as a bid for sympathy or help, but just to give context for some of my goals.) Thankfully my company has good disability coverage and I’m able to work as I can, 10-ish hours a week right now, with supplementary pay from disability insurance.
My currently active Beeminder goals, in order of creation as best I can remember:
makestuff
Crafting goal. This one is autodata using Toggl Track to track time spent crafting. Initially I had “craft” set up as a project with “embroidery,” “knitting,” etc., as the titles of the time entries, but as I’ve read more about how Toggl Track works (prompted by using it as autodata for Beeminder) I understand the hierarchy more, and I’ve changed “craft” to a client, craft types have become projects, and individual craft projects (i.e., “Peaks Island Hood” is one of my current knitting projects, with knitting as the project and craft as the client) are now the time entries. Being able to easily switch the autodata source from the “craft” project to the “craft” client was clutch!
Previously (a long time ago) I had a crafting Beeminder goal that was set up as X number of projects per year. I found I got super weaselly with that because it was stressful trying to wrap something up quickly when I got close to the deadline, and I’m currently finding projects that are not really finished that I’m pretty sure I just declared finished for the Beeminder goal. A time goal works much better for me.
This is set to a fairly low rate, which is working well for me. I didn’t want to stress myself out pushing myself to work on craft projects when I have so much else going on (i.e., cancer treatment). I find that I feel motivated to keep my buffer more than a week, and it’s just enough to push me to find crafting time outside of my weekly craft group–or to do some crafting if I miss a week of the group.
readingpages
This goal is just… kind of for fun because it’s awesome that there is a Storygraph integration. 
It’s not set at a rate to push me to read more, really, though it has prompted me to read instead of playing around on my phone. That’s just where I want it for now. I have had a few issues with the integration but they’re not Beeminder’s fault–just sort of the way things happen (and Nicky helped me out when I was slightly panicked about one)!
water
The reason I got back into Beeminder after a few years away! I read that it’s really helpful to drink a ton of water while going through radiation treatment to keep yourself hydrated from the inside out. I brainstormed ways to keep myself drinking plenty of water, and Beeminder naturally came to mind. I’m counting it by refills of the large Klean Kanteen water bottles I drink from all the time (which both have Beeminder stickers on them 
).
This is a great goal! Just its existence got me to start drinking more water. I adjusted the road up twice before I was happy with it–now I start out each day blue and end it green, which is exactly what I want. It actually might be working too well–a healthy person would probably be fine with this much water, but I suspect I am low on electrolytes, so I’m going to start making sure some of that water every day has an electrolyte supplement in it. That’s a Habitica thing, not Beeminder, since I want to do it exactly once a day and not have too much punishment if I miss one.
bedtime
Like it says on the tin, getting to bed on time, while allowing myself to stay up later some nights. Still fine-tuning this one… I started the slope out way too high. See, you can add datapoints with colons in them for times, but you can’t set the rate that way, so I had to do math in my head (OK, I could have used a calculator, but didn’t) and i got confused and just set it at 10.5. Since my real, eventual goal is 10 and I have a Habitica Daily of going to bed by 10, that’s silly. I’ve lowered the goal and plan to lower it still further, but I’ve only had the goal for about a week so I want to take some time to get a sense of my actual rate.
braidingsweetgrass
Odometer goal to read the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I am really enjoying Beeminding books! I’m dissatisfied with this goal, however, because of the way the slope changes abruptly about halfway through. When I set up the goal, I put 25 pages a day as the goal, thinking that was a good rate to read at (and it is). But what I really wanted to do was ensure I finish it before I need to return it to the library, so I immediately went to the commitment dial and put in the goal date and total number of pages. That gave me ~18 pages a day, rather less than the initial goal… but of course that only applies after the 7-day akrasia horizon. I would have preferred to have the same slope the whole time. Would that be a use for the graph editor? I’m a little scared of that.
Regardless, the goal is definitely having the desired effect. I’m highly motivated to read the minimum pages per day to get rid of that pesky notification bubble on the iOS app 
and I’ve been reading beyond the minimum every day; I’m spending time reading instead of on my phone. And the book is wonderful and I’m enjoying it a great deal.
capturethecastle
Another odometer goal for reading a book! I own this book, but it’s my book club’s pick for August, so I want to finish it before the meeting, so that’s my deadline. This time I started the goal in advance and gave myself a 7-day flat spot at the beginning, so editing my goal with the deadline and goal total gave me a nice straight slope the whole time. I don’t necessarily want to do that every time I Beemind a book, though; often, as with Braiding Sweetgrass, I don’t know that I want to Beemind a book until I’m partway through it.
I was recently reminded of the ability to restart odometer goals by entering a 0 datapoint, so maybe that will work better? I’ll try it with my next book goals, I think.
OK, that’s enough for now. I’ll come back later with some thoughts about future Beeminder goals, and updates about the ones I have now.
I need a specific project for office cleaning so I can Beemind my way to having a cleaner and more organized office/craft room. I’ve also realized it’s quite difficult to take time in the day to work on that while my kid is home, so I’ll try to start it back up when he’s in school in a couple weeks.
but I can’t figure it out so I’m just creating a new goal for the new book I want to Beemind. I can’t seem to get my booksss goal to accept my goal of 296 as being higher than my previous goal, even though it’s an odometer goal and I’ve already put in the 0 datapoint.