cute idea -> Some day I wanna do that

Akrasia
1

This idea totally stolen from either @adamwolf or @apolyton, I’m not sure. I can’t find the post anymore, it has sunk into the abyss of discourse. But it works too well for me not to resurface the idea again:

Create your goal super lenient and with a 30 day safety buffer. I use it for working on things that are not immediately important but which I still would like to see happen.

I have a lot of cute and tiny ideas floating in my head and in the past they ended up on an ever growing list of project ideas pile of shame. Things like:

  • Use the old needle line printer I got to log when there is suspicious activity (say unexpected ssh login) on my server.
    • It makes use of this ancient but still working piece of hardware,
    • serves as a log that can not be erased by an attacker and
    • is also an audible notification :wink:
  • create a small http server for bouncing trello webhook updates (POST) back to Beeminder as GET
  • make a scala program to
    • convert bash scripts into something more sane such as
      • haskell with turtle
      • rust
      • scala
      • python with plumbum
    • and then maybe make a github bot that files PRs to open source repositories to do this for their bash scripts

They’re all not terribly important but I’m sure I’d enjoy working on them. So I made goals for them and set them so they are super lenient but you know every once in a while they encourage me to trickle some time into them. And it works great!

May this be of help to someone :slight_smile: And kudos to whomever came up with this originally!

7 Likes
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Sounds like @adamwolf wrote that. But I have a couple of letient goals that are not super important but still need to be done (like receipts tracking that tend to pile up little by little).

2 Likes
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Fun!

My intent was actually a little different–it was a trick that works well for me for “Yeah, I should make a Beeminder goal for that” and then never getting around to starting the goal, since today wasn’t a great day to start doing the work. So I decoupled creating the commitment from starting the effort by increasing the initial safety buffer.

1 Like