Empowered to Accept Who I Am

Life
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I just found Beeminder in the last week or so, and I wanted to mention how empowering I feel it has been for me, even just in this short time.

Essentially, Beeminder lets me accept who I am. I’m not broken, useless, lazy, or even dumb. I’m just me. And I have a tough time doing things I want to do even though they will make me happy, feel good, be self-satisfied, and please the people around me. Instead I just sit on the couch and watch bad TV, go to sleep earlier than necessary, or browse the internet reading and doing stuff that serves no purpose except wasting my life!

Other people have a “Beeminder” in their heads. I don’t. But now I have one in my phone!

Time will tell how much I need the sting factor. Right now, the daily reminders of the stuff I TRULY want to fill my life with have been enough to prod me into action (I haven’t watched TV in 5 days, and not even on purpose!!)

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<glow!> So good to hear this and I’d love to hear a followup in a month (and 6 months, and a year). Insert bee pun involving “honeymoon phase”.

I’m curious what you mean about sleeping earlier than necessary. Sounds the opposite of everyone else I know. Everything else sounds entirely familiar though!

And it doesn’t sound like this is an issue but if you feel bad about not having a “Beeminder” in your head, check out The Type Bee Personality.

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I totally get the honeymoon phase thing. Ultimate I think the different between this and what I’ve tried before is that this gets around me feeling guilty and self-conversing about what I shouldn’t and should do, and instead feels very unemotional and matter-of-fact.

You know, instead of “I haven’t done the laundry in a while. It’s starting to pile up. I’m really not a very good housekeeper. Why do I suck so bad?” it becomes “Do laundry by Friday”. No inner monologue.

Sleep is my life-avoidance mechanism of choice–if it’s 10pm and my bedroom is a mess, easy solution – turn out the light and go to sleep. It is also something I often default to over staying up later and, um, not sleeping. Since I’m up most days by 6am, extra sleep is an easy thing to justify to myself.

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It’s exciting isn’t it? Though I’m expecting the real test for me will be about 2 months in as that’s tended to be when I drop habits.

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I thought I might check in, since I have 8 goals that have hit the 29/30 day marks.

So far, I’m feeling like I’m accomplishing so much more than I would without Beeminder. In some cases, like laundry and certain household tasks, that maybe isn’t the case, since my house was generally neat, and my kids generally had clean clothes, before Beeminder – so maybe it’s just that I’m more aware of the amount of time I’m actually spending on some of those tasks (which helps me feel better about myself – who doesn’t want some of that!!)

For other tasks, I can pretty confidently say that without beeminder, I’d have done none of it. And, if I turned Beeminder off, I’d pretty quickly stop.

Right now, I have 26 goals. A few are very infrequent items (vet appointment for dog, hair appointments for me and my kid), but without Beeminder, I’ll put them off indefinitely. Most, however, are day to day things. I’m planning to add a couple additional goals to break out types of piano practice, and add in a new running goal.

I’ve been more motivated than ever before, but I’ve also been able to build up safety buffers – partly because of the extra motivation, and partly because I was being conservative on how much I could/needed to do. I’ve set up autoratchet to make the goals a little more difficult, without dialing up the roads, just yet.

I have archived one goal, basically because Beeminding helped me see even the non-akratic me doesn’t really want to do it right now :wink:

So far, Beeminder continues to work for me.

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This is seriously powerful praise! My glowing has intensified. (: Even the part about archiving one of the goals because Beeminder provided the insight that you don’t truly value it – that’s a beautiful counterargument to some Beeminder hate we sometimes hear about Beeminder being a tool to force yourself to do things you don’t actually want to do but feel you should. I maintain that Beeminder users are more self-aware than that. So thank you for helping prove that point!

Btw, in case you get carried away, check out Beating Beeminder Burnout.

Thanks again for sharing your progress!

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It’s been 6 months now… Would love to hear your latest thoughts, good or bad!

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