Goal troubleshooting around holiday issues...

[shanaqui]

Greetings folks!

I find myself in need of a rubber ducky (at least) and perhaps some external opinions about one of my goals, since my usual method of talking it out with my wife hasn’t led either of us to any solid feelings about how it should go.

First off, it’s this goal: shanaqui/2025books

The purpose of the goal is to read the books I buy promptly, and never have more than 20 books bought in 2025 on my shelves unstarted. A book counts for the goal if I’ve bought it (or received it as a gift or advance reader’s copy) and haven’t started reading it yet.

It’s been going pretty well all year. I don’t know how many books I’ve bought in 2025 in all, but I currently only have 12 that I haven’t started yet (and four of those are on my December reading list).

Still, that leaves me with only 8-12 books allowed for Christmas, an event which usually leads to everybody buying me a book or three. It’s hard to predict how many I might receive.

On my birthday, I just accepted the risk of derailing, read down the pile as much as I could (you can see the dip in August right before the jump way up) and started a number of books all on the same day in order to avoid derailing. So there is precedent for how to handle an influx but Christmas tends to be… special. (Some might say excessive.)

So far, I’ve had a few thoughts on how to handle it:

• End the goal on 24th December, and be safe no matter how many books people buy me. How much trouble can I possibly get into between then and the beginning of 2026, when I’ll make a new goal? Pros: no derailing! Cons: nothing to stop me making reckless book purchases between Christmas Eve and 1st January.
• Ignore the books I receive for Christmas for the purposes of this graph. Pros: the graph continues to constrain my purchases right up to the end of the year. Cons: feels like it’d make the graph kinda untruthful.
• Dial in a jump to the graph that should keep me safe no matter what. Pros: no derail, can keep the graph going to the end of the year, graph stays truthy. Cons: I kinda like the way it looks as just a flat line… and aesthetic considerations do weigh with me here. Also, I can get a rough guess of how many books will be purchased for me from my wife, but only a rough one.
• Use the same precedent as my birthday and make no changes at all, keeping the goal going to the end of the year. Pros: consistency! Graph stays pretty and truthy! Cons: I’ll very likely derail, which kinda sucks when I’ve been doing so very, very well, and that will make the graph messy.

Has anyone got any other solutions in mind? Do any of the pros/cons convince or fail to convince you? Does something stand out as the best answer? Do you have an alternative idea?

Having typed this all out, I think my favourite solutions would be ending the goal on 24th December, or just going with the precedent of my birthday and continuing the goal exactly as-is until 31st December… but I keep wavering back and forth, and also pouting a little bit about elements of both.

It’s likely there isn’t a totally perfect solution, but maybe y’all can help me refine something.

[scarabaea]

That’s an interesting conundrum! For me, an important aspect of Beeminder philosophy is to beemind things that we can control and not beemind thing that we cannot control (and those that our controllable actions influence only slightly, among many other factors, perhaps, beemind with a huge leeway). Getting new books at your own initiative is something you do control, getting them for present is arguably not. (Unless you would want to tell all friends not to give you books as a present, but that’s a pretty radical and unintuitive way of “controlling” this situation, in my mind ) So, having that in mind, I personally would go with the second strategy.

I actually had a similar dilemma earlier this year when as one of my monthly goals I limited the number of ARCs I may request or grab during that month. And then I started receiving widgets… which I didn’t even think to write about in the rules of goal at the initial setup, because prior to that I only ever got one widget, so I didn’t even think that would be a likely event. But I thought like this: what kind of behaviour do I actually want to measure and modify with this goal? I wanted to keep at bay the practice of going on NetGalley and requesting everything I like, getting totally blind at the moment to how this fits within my reading plans. Receiving a widget is absolutely orthogonal to this effort. So, in your case, what behaviour are you trying to measure and modify with having this goal?

But I totally get the consistency argument and QS aspects that are favored better by other strategies.

[scarabaea]

Oh, and I think I have another strategy in mind. Put all the gifted books into a “buffer” pile. And then use this as a source for “shopping for new books” in the sense of this goal. It can also be a running thing, not just a one-time thing for holidays and birthdays. With the caveat that you have to empty the buffer pile before acquiring a new title at your own volition, but things that you randomly receive at somebody else’s decision can be added to the buffer pile. I might want to implement this strategy for my own TBR-minding, actually.

[dreev]

Great minds think alike! I was totally about to propose @scarabaea’s buffer strategy. That feels fair and in the spirit of the goal.

(Recap: Nicky’s Beeminder graph caps the number of unread books they have. Edge-skating such a graph would mean you always have to finish (or start, whatever) reading a book before acquiring a new one. But then what to do if someone gifts you a pile of books? Maybe say they don’t count as acquired yet; they’re just on deck, awaiting integration into your library.)

As long as you solemnly promise to never put books you acquired yourself into that buffer!

Actually @scarabaea’s solution elegantly handles that, with the rule that you can’t acquire any books yourself until the buffer is empty.

The one downside here is a small hit to the truthiness of the graph: it makes sense for the spikes to correspond with your birthday and with Christmas.

I actually think your solution of scheduling big jumps in the red line for the holidays makes a ton of sense. You can use the graph editor to trim them down to match the actual spikes after the fact and then push you back down to your standard cap of 20 at whatever rate feels realistic. I don’t think I’d view that as an uglification of the graph?

If you did go with ending the goal and restarting it after the holidays [1] I think you could close those the loophole you mention (a book-buying spree while unbeeminded) by promising not to buy any books until the goal’s restarted.

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[1] Ending and restarting goals is something I’m known for hating personally, because I think for myself (and most people?) the risk is too high of failing to actually restart it. See a million blog posts like “planning to forget”.

[olimay]

Could you end the current goal on Christmas Eve but start a new one on Christmas, when presumably you’d know the updated total? I think Christmas Day to New Year’s is above the minimum goal length and it seems like a special period that needs its own handling. On New Year’s you could then start your 2026books goal with a good idea for the coming year.

To Danny’s objection about ending and restarting goals: I get around that with a Do Less goal where I keep the red line at zero, then schedule future one-off things I have to do with value 1 that I then mark as zero as I complete them. It’s a little janky due to lack of advance reminders and needing to hunt for the thing putting you over the line for the day, but it’s how I run quite a few things, including calendialing. (I schedule my calendials for the entire year this way in one shot.)

[mad]

For me, my question is this: how good are the books you get gifted? Like, do you actually want to read all of them? I know obviously books your wife pick out for you will be special / readable only on that basis, but if your uncle gets you a book that doesn’t quite tickle your fancy - do you read it anyway?

(Admittedly I’m not a reader as prolific as you - I do about two books a month - so perhaps for you a suboptimal book from your uncle isn’t that big a time investment)

I ask because it feels like you’ve got an unspoken assumption, that you have to read every book you’re gifted. Can you just give yourself a safety buffer of whatever you think is appropriate (e.g. 10) and only select the 10 most appealing books that you are given?

You can combine this with the buffer idea someone else posed, of that being your new “shopping” place.

The other thing is: do you DNF books, or do you always finish? Because the ice cream truck loophole here is to read one sentence of all the least appealing books and then declare them as DNF, and do whatever you normally do with DNF books (I assume sometimes you pick them back up, even!)

[poisson]

A sort of alternate version of the buffer idea would be to allow your wife to “take possession” of the gift books, and only “give them to you” when you’re ready, with the understanding that she would never let you use this as a loophole in other circumstances. Maybe this is functionally no different from the buffer pile idea, maybe it is, I am unsure.

[shanaqui]

Thank you everyone for the input!

@dreev

I actually think your solution of scheduling big jumps in the red line for the holidays makes a ton of sense. You can use the graph editor to trim them down to match the actual spikes after the fact and then push you back down to your standard cap of 20 at whatever rate feels realistic. I don’t think I’d view that as a uglification of the graph?

I guess I’m mostly enjoying the simplicity of the current graph, but I could always schedule the jump and try not to need it. Then if I am truly flooded with wonderful books (please, world! That would be lovely!) then I’ll be safe from derailing, but also have the chance to get things back down to 20, maybe even the same day. I’ve been over 20 a few times, I just corrected that same-day by starting books.

(There’s always the risk of starting books just to get the graph on track without any intent of finishing them, but that’s an ice-cream truck loophole I intentionally haven’t exploited. If I start something, I mean to finish it sometime in the foreseeable future. It helps that it’d mess up my reading stats if I didn’t!)

@olimay

Could you end the current goal on Christmas Eve but start a new one on Christmas, when presumably you’d know the updated total? I think Christmas Day to New Year’s is above the minimum goal length and it seems like a special period that needs its own handling. On New Year’s you could then start your 2026books goal with a good idea for the coming year.

I actually kinda like this idea! And it’d help me focus on reading the Christmas books, too.

@mad

For me, my question is this: how good are the books you get gifted? Like, do you actually want to read all of them? I know obviously books your wife pick out for you will be special / readable only on that basis, but if your uncle gets you a book that doesn’t quite tickle your fancy - do you read it anyway?

Almost all of them will be books I want. My family buy books for me from a wishlist mostly, with only the occasional deviation from that. Plus, I’m only expecting gifts from very close family and friends, so if they do take a punt on something else, it’s likely to be worth a read.

(For anyone curious – the wishlist is curated year-round and has a lot on it, such that folks can still surprise me with a book I forgot I was interested in. People also tend to choose books that they share an interest in or liked themselves, so we can talk about them. It’s also understood that I might not like or permanently keep every book, but that I adore getting books anyway and that needn’t put them off giving me a book I may not love. )

[shanaqui]

Update: I am starting to lean toward ending the current goal on Christmas Eve and starting a new one on Boxing Day with the new total… and keeping it running throughout 2026, with the aim of specifically reading all my 2025-unread books by, say, the end of June.

Whatever I do will set precedent for next year, because the combo of my various reading goals this year has been amazing for getting me to work on my backlog. It’s the only time I’ve convincingly maintained a downward trend on my overall goal for reducing my to be read pile.

[gfredericks]

Totally different idea: beemind the number of pages you read (or books you start/finish, whatever you want to track), and use a basic algorithm to regularly adjust the slope to react to the size of your pile.

A dead-simple example would be “once a week, if the number of unstarted books is >10, increase slope by N; else decrease by N”.