I thought the question of “what negative externality on my future-self am I trying to avoid with this goal?” was interesting and tried to write them down for all 30 of my goals. It was an interesting exercise!
This doesn’t cover quite everything but the major common features were:
- a. it’ll stop me getting stressed
- b. it puts me in the habit of doing a bit of something (nearly always with the intention that it’ll make it easier to do more of it later)
- c. it’ll stop me wasting money
- d. it’ll stop me from having an unfinished project (generally something that takes up excess mental or physical space)
- e. it’ll stop me from being my best self
(Edited to add: I just realised I turned some of those into positives while summarising, the negatives were “get stressed” etc.)
It was also obvious that some goals operate on different time scales to others and that affects how I think of them:
- short - if i derail on these the consequences pile up quickly in days/weeks
- medium - if i derail on these the consequences aren’t immediate but start to be felt in weeks/months,
- long - these are ones where derailing has little effect but keeping at them for months/years has benefits.
Some observations:
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most short term goals are (a) “don’t get stressed” but some of the long term ones are too.
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pretty much all the (e) “be your best self” goals are long term ones
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the (e) “be your best self” feature the most ill-defined of the features above but might also be the most important to me - it’s inherent in every goal but a more obvious feature of some than others
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some goals have confused intentions - e.g. am I concerned about the short-term problem of getting value out of a fitness subscription or the long-term problem of staying healthy as I get older?
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I think I have my view of beeminder pretty much firmly in the “taxes not punishment” framing anyway but
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derailing on a short term goal feels like the higher price you pay for consuming from the in room mini-bar rather than going down to the bar (or the grocery store)
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derailing on a long term goal feels more like putting a purchase I can’t afford on a credit card and I’m going to pay extra interest for it in the end but for today-me it makes no difference.
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an aside that I thought was irrelevant until I thought a bit more - both of the above analogies are things I avoid doing in real life but I have a much stronger aversion to the credit card scenario than the mini-bar one because I think today-me better understands the short term trade-off.
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at the moment I have most of my goals at a flat $5 derailment charge which is enough to motivate me most of the time and not enough to make me stop beeminding lots of things or worrying about the fine print of why I derailed, I just pay up, but I think my conclusion here should be that I should make my short-term goals be taxed at a higher rate. For long term goals keeping the goal going is more important, for short term ones doing it today rather than tomorrow is generally the priority.
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I don’t have no excuses mode switched on but I think I generally treat derailments as type 4 “Taxing Quantified Self. No excuses except for forgetting to enter data.”. I try to keep everything over the akrasia horizon in order that “injury mode” is already built in and I feel like I’d only want a get-out clause in case of something that prevented me from amending my beeminder goals to reflect reality. I guess that would be “coma mode”. I could take my 30 goals all derailing once but I’d hope beeminder would realise something was up at that point and stop charging me! (And I think that definitely falls in the “opposite of what your phone company would do”.)