Derailment post-mortems

Akrasia
1

I’m curious what strategies or templates other beeminder users have to retrospect or run post mortems on their derailments.

Personally my beeminder profile is “derailments happen from time to time, and that’s ok” - I set relatively low pledge caps, and see the occasional derailment fees as part of the cost of getting benefits from beeminding.

I have a rough mental checklist of questions each time I derail:

  1. Why did I derail?
  2. Is my goal set to an appropriate level? Should I make it more or less aggressive?
  3. Is this goal still important to me? Why do I care about it?
  4. What is one concrete action I can take to reduce the risk of future derailments?

Having said this, I still derail, and worse still derail multiple times for very similar reasons, so curious to hear other approaches from the community!

7 Likes
2

Hey Theo! That’s my philosophy too. I’m less good at the post-mortems though your #3 goes through my head after every derailment. Not everything needs to be beeminded, and priorities change.

Making the goal more or less aggressive has many dimensions, of course: everything from the slope and pledge to the autoratcheting and derailment behaviour.

There are a bunch of people who post here in the Life category about their derailments, new goals, etc. Effectively beeminding out loud, which I find helpful.

4 Likes