Starting today I’ll be using beeminder to make progress on my podcast.
My first goal is to publish regularly on Wednesdays, achieved with a weekly goal of one episode.
Then, I have another one, podcast pomodoro, where the point is to do two pomodoros a day on the pod (including emailing people, transcript, web, video editing, voice editing, researching, buying stuff). I’ll be using Strict Workflow Beeminder for that.
Lastly, I’m reviving the good old’ tweet goal so I make sure I do tweet once a day (kinda related to the podcast, because I’d be posting my stuff there).
Anyway, I know that one podcast a week will be hard, even more if I don’t have any guests on, so to mitigate that I have:
beeminder, duh (aka I might just derail and that’s fine)
a special rule allowing me to make a 30m face cam video in case I have no guest
On top of that, if you notice that, outside of the derailings, I’ve archived this post or made the commitment less strict before March 22 2023, and you are a Beeminder user who answered this thread before the crime, I owe you $100. You’re encouraged to take screenshot of the entire post so that even if this is taken down you still have proof, so you can ping/DM me on Twitter asking for you money if I fail.
LAST RULE: because people on this forum are smart and might have good ideas, I’m allowing myself to add or remove 100 characters total in this bloc in the next 24h (this line being crossed won’t count as a character change).
Note: one thing I might need to change with the 100 characters is “I owe you $100 if you’ve been a Beeminder user before I made this post”, or even “only if you’ve answered this post”.
Yep one a day is wrong, it was one week, nice catch! (edited.)
Added “And you are a Beeminder user who answered this thread before the crime,” to limit the scope of the $100 (where the crime is me archiving/slowing down).
Yep, let’s keep that pseudo-anonymous, since I wanted this post to be about beeminder goals, without of promoting anything. (Link to the podcast is in the weekly goal anyway.)
Wow, that is pretty extreme. Do you not want any sort of equivalent to the akrasia horizon for changing the difficulty or consciously abandoning the goal – like a month’s notice in this thread or something?
There’s a balance between meeting self-imposed commitments and being locked in to something that has become less relevant. But you know all that, since you’re approaching your five-year beeversary, so we can take this as an eyes-wide-open sort of commitment.
re being locked in to what might become less relevant: I’ve already been releasing videos for a year-ish, so another year doesn’t seem too crazy. And I didn’t notice it has already been 5 years, fun.
I guess the general claim is that for those kind of things, there’s some kind of magic in being regular. Like, for today, there was a beeminder alarm going on and even if there was a lot of things to fix (thumbnail, jingle, audio editing, tweet, outline, descriptions, uploads) I still managed to do all of them because I thought “one a week, on wednesdays”.
Re consciously stopping the goal: that might be the function of having to paypal people $100?
