I enjoyed writing out my post in the Introduction thread the other day and I found it stoked up quite a few productive thoughts about my beeminder goals and related life things. So I might try one of these forum journals for a bit! Not sure how often I’ll want to post, and maybe I’ll give up on this pretty quickly. But giving it a try.
Current goals review
declutter
In the green (15 days), but this one does have a habit of sneaking up on me. Next weekend is probably a good time to declutter something.
chores
In the green (9 days). As I mentioned in my intro post, I recently organised my todos a bit in a way that really wants me to increase the slope here. I’m not sure I’ve ever had this much buffer on it in the ~16 months this goal has been running! I’ve just now upped it from 2 to 2.3 tasks per day; maybe I’ll go higher if it still keeps accumulating significant buffer.
todoistzero
In the green (4 days). This is a fairly strong habit at this point, and I only tend to slip up on it if I’m out of routine or having a really bad day. Not planning to archive it any time soon though, because it’s trivial to record and it’s good to have beeminder backing me up to avoid the scenario ‘oops, that 2-day lapse turned into a weeklong lapse and now I don’t have this habit any more’.
bedtime
In the green (3 days), but mainly because I derailed at the beginning of this week and got some flat spot. I haven’t taken full advantage of the flat spot, so I’ll call it a win. The clocks have just gone back, which ought to help me a bit with this one, temporarily.
exercise
In the green (3 days), though as mentioned in the intro post, I’m not enormously happy with the outcomes from this one. I might end up archiving it, or at least changing it pretty significantly, because…
trainingminutes
I have started this brand new goal attempting to make up for the deficiencies in exercise. It just logs activity minutes recorded on my Garmin watch (any activity I’ve chosen to record, not just the intensity minutes). I’ve started the slope out at an extremely puny 12 minutes per day just to get some tracking going. I foresee increasing this very soon, but I’m not sure exactly what a good goal will be.
One fine print issue here is that walking feels like a bit of a grey area. If I contemplate saying yes, count it, I feel like that way madness lies: I will feel compelled to start turning on GPS tracking for mundane everyday little errands like nipping to the shops at lunchtime or walking from the car park to my desk on office days. On the other hand, (a) walking is truly useful to have in the quiver as a ‘de minimis’ exercise option that I can do even when feeling really rough (and that has a tendency to help significantly with the roughness); (b) sometimes walking really is reasonably strenuous exercise! e.g. a day out hillwalking feels like very legit activity minutes. I’m going to attempt a risky compromise stance in which walking only counts if I’m Walking For Exercise and for at least 20 minutes — maybe I can frame it as, if I would have turned the Garmin on even in the absence of this goal? I will have to be careful not to let this get weaselly though, as otherwise this goal will end up with the same problem that exercise has had. It’s possible that I might be better off with an additional, separate goal for walking, but that feels like a different problem/question.
eatwell
Brand new and in the orange (1 day), mostly just because of the flat bit of road I started out with. Earnest trying at this starts tomorrow (Monday), because I’m not really going to aim to earn any datapoints apart from the Log food one at weekends — though it seems inevitable that I’ll sometimes do poorly enough during the week to be forced into weekend compliance. Theoretically this goal is just tracking something I was already trying to do, so it shouldn’t be any great shock to the system; in practice, I’ve been doing very poorly at it, so it might feel a bit tough to redouble my efforts. Beeminder to the rescue in terms of actually sticking to it?
Upcoming breaks
None scheduled in at the moment.
Goals I’m considering adding
- Something to encourage me to log off from work on time and/or focus a bit better during work hours, maybe?
- Something for lights-out or screens-off time, or out-of-bed time?
- Writing in this thread? Not sure yet whether it’s going to be something I want to stick with or not.
- Walking? I don’t know… I don’t especially want this as a goal, it’s not something I’m specifically trying to do more of. It just feels like an obvious component of the Right Solution to my problems with tracking exercise. Maybe what I really want is something like a goal that adds my Garmin activity minutes (excluding all walking!) to my walking minutes with some suitable weighting?
I won’t add anything soon, as I’ve got two very new goals on the go at the moment. Don’t want to overwhelm myself.