Thanks for posting some links to get the thoughts flowing, Daniel! The three blog posts you linked to all focus on how to beemind many goals at once. I’m encountering a somewhat different challenge: how to handle conflicts between my (extremely limited) beeminder goals and major deadlines in the rest of my life.
I’m beeminding only one goal right now—pomodoros of reading. It’s a goal I found particularly vulnerable to akrasia and hyperbolic discounting, because reading a bit on any given day is low importance. But making steady progress on my reading goal is very important to me. Overall, beeminding this goal has been a huge success! I’m reading more regularly and in greater volume than before.
But when an emergency day for my beeminder goal falls near an otherwise very important deadline in my life, it sneaks up on me. I had Give Presentation on my calendar and I was pushing hard for days beforehand to get everything ready for the presentation. I didn’t realize early enough that my emergency day for my reading goal would fall on the day before my presentation. By the time I did realize, it was too late: I was in crunch mode getting my presentation ready, and didn’t have time to spare for my “low priority on any given day” reading goal. I was definitely better off paying $30 and getting an extra pomodoro of sleep before my presentation. My only regret is not doing an extra pomodoro of reading 5 days before my presentation.
The most relevant topic I’ve found is @windairen’s thread about planning emergency days in advance. Which led me to @palfrey’s Beeminder calendar integration. (Without reviving a 4 year old thread, let me say here: I think the calendar integration would be an excellent feature to build into beeminder.)
I’ve set up the calendar integration plugin, so now my beeminder emergency day will appear on my calendar alongside the other big deadline dates in my life. I’m hoping that will help me notice conflicts earlier and address them in advance instead of derailing.
If others have their own advice or anecdotes to share, those would be very welcome 