Gmzamz’s Beeminder journal

[gmzamz]

I’m giving myself more time on my iphonescreentime goal due to carplay adding to my total. Other than that no derails, new goals or changes.

EDIT: I’m also ratcheting so this is due next Sunday

[rubygagotoku]

I love your use of obsidian to track your derails; I had never thought of having an obsidian note for each of my goals before, but I might copy you! It would be great to get some overview of the patterns of my own derails, and not just an “ahhh life happens” attitude. Thank you for sharing!

[gmzamz]

Derails

• Just one, had too much fun playing a video game that I blew past the deadline. woopsies

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

• Adding a 2 day pre/post-5k break for stravaruntime.

• 2x Toggl goals for Scrimba (coding) and Skritter (Chinese). Both set at a mere 5 min a day. It’s primarily to remind my to actually spend time on them

Thoughts

• bedtime has historically been a data only goal. Looking back it seem like the rate is actually just right. I’m pondering switching this into enforcement mode to push me to go to bed earlier. My only concern is that since it’s not ‘live’ it would be too easy to derail without realizing it. Since it only actually gets data once I go to bed, and by then it’s too late.

• @rubygagotoku, I wasn’t actually tracking derails using obsidian, just the various non-legit reasons and if they apply. It’s a really good idea though, so now I am! Thanks for the idea. I use the following dataview query in each of my goal notes to get all the derails mentioned in my journal. I add a dataview inline field to the journal and . After testing with an inline [date:: <derail date>], it looks like I can natively use that field

• Feel free to yoink : )

  TABLE WITHOUT ID file.link AS Note, L.date AS Date, L.text AS Blurb
  FROM [[]] Flatten file.lists AS L
  WHERE contains(L.tags, "#Beeminder/derail")
  WHERE contains(L.outlinks, [[]])
  

[gmzamz]

Derails

• Brush_morning, slacked off too long before it became nighttime

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

• setting stravaruntime weekends off

Thoughts

• I’m tired…

[gmzamz]

Derails

• 1 2 bulk derails - super long work days. The first one only had non-legit derails, the second (today’s) will have some legit.

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

• 2 month break for pretty much all non-essential goals
• 1.5 month break for beemindjournal so I’ll be forced to revisit the rates before being hit with all my goals at once.

Thoughts

• Current events in my life are requiring that I focus all my attention to my work, and I just can’t keep up with both beeminder and work right now

[gmzamz]

Derails

• beemindjournal - I didn’t do the math on what day it would’ve fallen on (last Friday) and chose to eat the $10 instead of posting…

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

• Archived most of my todoist goals. I’ve pretty much moved completely to Obsidian.md, and haven’t figured out how to integrate beeminder with it naturally yet

Thoughts

• My YNAB reconcile and ‘approve transactions’ goals continue to be the most useful things I’m beeminding. Mostly because it’s not an every day thing, and it works great for reminding myself to do it while also providing more incentive than just a biweekly reminder
• Still fairly busy but it has slowed down some

[gmzamz]

Derails

• YNAB reconcile - My 2 month break made it a huge lift to finish since it’s not possible to make incremental progress the way I have it set up. Technically, I’m not sure incremental progress is possible, since there’s only two states: not reconciled since DATE and reconciled today, three if you count multiple account having different reconciled dates. I setup a whole week of lead days and still didn’t get everything reconciled : /

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

• Dialing beemindjournal down to once a month (ish). I just don’t have that much to update right now
• It’s not set up yet, but I installed activity watch on my PC and I’m going to make a goal for it. Likely to be very similar to iphonescreentime and ipadscreentime, just with more granularity since I’m not working around Apple’s restrictions.

[gmzamz]

Derails

• YNAB reconcile - again . At least I cleared out everything from the past two months so going forward it shouldn’t be as much of a problem. Loved finding all the things it incorrectly imported though…

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

• Reactivated checktodos - obsidian is great but it’s clearly not built for tasks. After two months of on and off usage I’m switching back to Todoist. Only 14k more karma before grandmaster
• Dialed stravaruntime down to 0* - not because I don’t wanna run but because I hated how it keeps causing me to run on my break days and not prompt me on my run days. This is the third(?) time I’ve been annoyed by this so I’m just gonna throw some AI at it and vibe a solution. Open bounty for 10 honey bucks any time after june 9th and every tuesday thereafter to the first person to ping me if I haven’t. It’ll be pretty clear since I’m planning on having it adjust out ~30 days so anything other than a linear red line means I got it working

Thoughts

• I never created a goal for it, but getting a robo-vacuum has let to a noticeably cleaner floor. Not because it vacuumed up dirt, but because I get paranoid and pickup all the misc cat toys on the floor every night lmao. Goes to show that changing your environment can instigate changes too, doesn’t have to be financially motivated

[gmzamz]

IT’S ALIIIIIIVE. I made it generic enough that I can just point it at any of my goals, with a neat little html page to manage it. Stores the actual schedule as a formatted string in the fineprint so I don’t need to worry about managing persistent data. I have it setup as a cron job in val.town so I don’t have to worry about managing my own infra

Note: 98% of the code was yolo-ed by AI so we’ll see how it holds up. Given it’s like 200 lines of actual logic I’m not super concerned

[gmzamz]

Derails

• Beemind journal - low cost and I didn’t really want to post anything
• Stravaruntime - Yeah I still hate running. I turned down the derail price while I was working on my custom scheduler because I felt bad calling non-legit for programming mistakes. I haven’t turned it back up yet and yeah I’ll still pay $5 not to run >_<
• Stravawalkies - I don’t remember why. probably a low energy day

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

New Goals - CHUNKY

• replaced beemindjournal with beemind-journal - that tracks this topic specifically and not all posts I make. Was wondering why this goal wasn’t going into a beemergency…
• Replaced ynab-more-dates with ynab-transaction-app - better tracking of transaction approval that uses my helper tool rather than a python script
• Replaced ynab-reconcile with ynab-reconcilliation - better tracking of account reconciliation that uses my helper tool rather than a python script
• computer-screentime - This is the goal that counts time on a custom webpage with my cursor in a specific area to force me off my computer (cursor-zone). Inspired by the game Step Away mentioned in @shanaqui’s journal. Since I can’t really use my computer without a mouse, this goal is working SHOCKINGLY well. This with a minimum time and the ability to ratchet myself into a hole is super useful for ‘frustrated action to force myself away from computer’
• less-eating-out - do-less goal to eat out less, imports YNAB transactions for (non-social) eating out, snacks and caffeine.
• more-groceries - do-more goal to actually buy groceries, imports grocery purchase transactions on YNAB
• meta-intentions - gains a +1 every time I use cursor-zone, so I have to periodically use it and not just coast off my buffer. mostly so I don’t forget cursor-zone exists
• meta-off-pc - gains the time from computer-screentime, and eventually will feed from other data sources like home-assistant outlet status/activity-watch, slightly redundant with computer-screentime, but I want ‘choosing to get off the computer’ and ‘not on the computer’ to be separate
• meta-strava-run - +1 every time I run since it’s too easy to get enough buffer on stravaruntime
• weight - withings weight, tracking only (for now)
• meta-weight - +1 every time I weigh in to make sure I actually weigh in
• singleplayer-games - This tracks my steam playtime on games I want to play but don’t because I’m always tired
• friendslop - all my multiplayer low-effort games so I actually play games with my friends

Dialing

• bedtime - update rate to signify absolute hour of bedtime rather than relative
• meta-weight - down to 1x/day. I forgot to change the default so now I get to weigh myself 21 times in the next week. woopsie
• Numerous others got a custom rate scheduler setup

Archived

• brush_night,brush_morning,Floss,journal,moreproteinshakes,shower - too easy to game by just checking off in todoist . I’ll un-archive them later once I figure out a better way to track them
• scrimba,Skritter - both were toggl based goals and were too easy to just fake a data point

Thoughts

• As you can see I’ve made LOTS of changes. Not going to lie, being able to just tell claude what I want is super nice. the default integrations work, but being able to tailor my own to exactly what I want is even nicer
• lots of new goals, so I’ve moved my pledge cap down some I don’t want to end up with 10 different $30-90 goals

[gmzamz]

Derails

• friendslop - bad mental day tbh, didn’t want to play with friends
• iphonescreentime - nonlegit derail, my conversion from LAST to SUM didn’t quite work. almost, I was only about 4 hours off, but this is a very edge skatey goal so woops
• bedtime - don’t remember why but probably too much reading
• iphone-wind-down - ill fated new goal for ‘stay off phone before bed’. didn’t last since I just can’t express that kind of goal yet. yet
• stravawalkies - nonlegit
• stravaruntime - I really hate running
• less-eating-out - forgot I was also counting snacks and a pending snack charge snuck in and derailed me.

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

• carplaytime, goal-count, ipadblocked, iphoneblocked, urgency - couple new data only goals that only serve to collect data
  • ipadblocked, iphoneblocked - both are using the PWA I made that only counts time when it’s physically preventing me from using the device
  • carplaytime - in particular serves only to track the time I spend driving. it’s using ‘connected to carplay’ as a proxy mechanic for that, and writing connect/disconnect datetimes which then gets converted to an interval for beeminder
  • goal-count, urgency - I just want to see what this looks like over time. I can see a reason to actually Beemind these and not just track, but I’m saving that for after a couple of months of data.
• more-groceries - dialed to 10/day, the previous rate of 2.5/day was way too low.
• more-groceries - ratcheted to 7 days of buffer. meta-weight - slightly reduced the rate again, I don’t really need to weigh myself every day
• computer-screentime → computer-blocked - renamed to better fit my naming scheme
• stravaruntime - bumping up in the custom-scheduler to 30 min mon/fri, backfilled to today as well.
• iphonescreentime - updated to use a sum of cumulative deltas rather than just LAST. it’s fairly inaccurate (inaccurate start/end times not duration) but it’s step in the right direction.
• phonedriving - new goal that tracks how much I use my phone while driving. currently fed by a synthetic AND(carplaytime, iphonescreentime), but since iphonescreentime is a bit unreliable (see above), I’m thinking of changing it to use the PWA blocking. Which would also actually prevent me from using my phone…
• friendslop - autoratchet set to 16 days

No Movement

• ynab-reconcilliation - works well
• ynab-transaction-app - works well
• beemind-journal - maybe a biiiit to low of a rate. I’ll make a decision next journal
• checktodos - working surprisingly well. Enabled autoratchet on it since it’s too easy to get 5 days of buffer actually after checking I’ve almost never had 5 days of buffer. reducing to 2 safe days
• friendslop - works well
• system-improvements - not much to say, made a bunch of progress on my tooling, but only a couple of ‘big features’.
• stravawalkies - this… works, but I wish I could limit it to ‘within 2 hours after I get home’
• singleplayer-games - maybe a bit to low of a rate…
• meta-off-pc - need to incorporate a smart outlet feeding this
• ipadscreentime - not even close to derailing, but since I use it for spotify, might be worth relaxing or deleting this goal
• meta-intentions - goal is not putting in enough work, probably archiving
• meta-strava-run - not much to say, it works
• bedtime - I’m thinking of switching this to a non-cumulative goal. ‘saving up’ time doesn’t reallllly make sense in this case. but that’s gonna be annnother non-legit derail

Thoughts

AI slop Personal Tools

• the cursor-zone app I made about a month ago has been putting in a LOT of work. I added the ability to stake money (via beeminder’s charge() endpoint), so when I want a session to last 2 hours, I can actually force that now. I don’t have a good way to enforce ‘I must have at least one 4 hour session’ since it’s a sum based goal. not sure it’s worth the lift adding it, I can just set a custom schedule for 12 hours on no-screen-sunday and while I’ll still have some time to scroll, I wouldn’t be able to waste all day on it
  • I also made another PWA for my iphone/ipad that does the same thing. I use those a bit less though, since right now my desktop pc is the biggest issue
• custom scheduler works fairly well. Had a bunch of issues since the native road does not play nice with AI agents, but after building a wrapper for it they can reason about it much better
  • ngl the way the road is built/interpreted has gotten me confused several times as well. And also resulted in a few non-legit derails
• I am slightly concerned about how these kind of tools will age. How long before things break? Am I leaving a massive security hole?

Missing Beeminder Datapoint ‘Type’

• More and more I’m finding myself using ‘interval’ datapoints to signify things. iphonescreentime, driving, block time, and a bunch of others
• Essentially everything is represented as a start and end time, with the value of the datapoint is the total time.
• I can also do some neat interval functions like AND/OR/NOT to compose new metrics from old
  • I.E. true-iphone-screentime is AND(iphonescreentime, NOT(iphoneblocked)). blocked time logically shouldn’t count towards my screentime, but it does. with this, I can negate the block time from counting.
  • I can have specific times that things are or are not allowed. block = AND(intervalgoal,NOT(block interval)). allow = AND(intervalgoal,block interval)
  • These combined with goal rates let me actually specify ‘must complete 45 min of X between 5-6am’

[gmzamz]

Derails

• stravaruntime - like 3 times. forgot to bump the cap back up to $90 post-custom scheduler and this is the result of that. should be less derails now that the stake is actually painful
• stravawalkies - long day, but not the kind that I’ve identified as a non-legit, so the derail stuck

New Goals, Dialing and Breaks

• Been playing with less-eating-out, dropped it down quite a bit, but that led to not actually enjoying my weekends so I’m raising up just a little bit

Thoughts

• Not really many updates tbh, I’ve got a core set of goals I track and they pretty much work.
• Vibed up a ‘send photo → get progress on goal’ app kinda like how forfeit does it. We’ll see how it works, planning on using it for misc ‘clean house’ tasks that can’t really have an autodata feed setup