May 2024 retrospective:
my Beeminder goals
my Intend life areas
derailments: fewer!
I derailed once on a household task, once on my more-walks goal. Happy with both!
life areas: more!
My autodata tagging system at Intend was getting out of hand and I finally realized that the solution was to bring back the HYA and INC life areas there. I’d archived them at the end of January and been using the miscellaneous tag, &, for the related to-dos. This made good sense from the viewpoint that these are, at their core, non-essential things that make life smoother but are not at the same level as my purpose goals. But after months of tagging multiple goals per day with [hya] and adding new autodata rules to an already-long list every time I added a relevant BM goal, I decided that minor nuance wasn’t worth the hassle.
This epiphany was assisted by the addition of a new Intend tag, [fun], and a new Intend area, LANG. I presently have three levels in my organizational framework; from most abstract to least, these are:
- meta: purpose | support | fun
- life area: feed | be | fit | … (etc – you can read what these mean at the Intend link at the top of this post)
- behavior: walks | steps | cleaning tasks | … (etc – you can see all of these at the Beeminder link at the top of this post)
I added [fun] at Intend because there kept being things on my daily to-do list that I didn’t know how to categorize, exactly; and as I started musing on adding foreign language study back into things, I had to find a place for it to go. It wasn’t a purpose goal – the things that make life worth living; it wasn’t a support goal – things that aren’t purpose-filled but do make life run more smoothly, even though I don’t necessarily want to do them. It was just for fun!
So, to sum up, I have three new/revived life areas at Intend – LANG, HYA, and INC – and three new goal areas at Beeminder – for Spanish, Mandarin, and language learning overall. Speaking of which…
foreign languages are back in the mix, with more adding next month
I wrote last month that the itch to study languages was growing. This month I added Spanish and Mandarin study back into my schedule, and so far I’ve been loving it. So much so that I’m going to add five more languages in June. You can read the details in the May retrospective at my LLORG log. Speaking of which…
I’m looking for an online faith community that’s like this one and the one at language-learners.org
The Beeminder forum is a huge support for me on the organizational side of living a purpose-filled life, and idem LLORG for my language-related pursuits. My ontological worldview is critical to my sense of self and purpose and joy, so I’m currently looking for a Christian counterpart.
Specifically, I’m looking for both a place to blog about my personal journey (like I do here and at LLORG, for the relevant topics) and a place to engage in asking and answering ontological questions with likeminded people – by which I mean, Christians who think deeply and well, who embrace science and rationality, and who value respectful exchanges where the goal is to gain new insight into objective truth rather than prescribe behavioral absolutes and unconsidered dogma. If anyone here has recommendations, please let me know!
data-driven insight for the win
In February I added a slew of specific yes-or-no Beeminder goals for individual household tasks: clean the downstairs half-bath, dust the upstairs, mop the kitchen, etc. I set each one to a frequency I call “oh my god, has it been that long? Gross!” At first cleaning still felt like it took a lot of my time, but a very interesting datum has gradually surfaced: most days, nothing is actually due. The workload is actually fairly light. Even though sometimes I do a chore MORE often than it’s scheduled. Who knew? I certainly didn’t, back when I wasn’t tracking it. So now the house is more reliably acceptably clean, while I more rarely feel like a household drudge. So awesome!
scaling back on refugee days for June
For the last two months I’ve worked multiple days, and in some ways that’s been lovely. But one of the reasons I was doing it didn’t pan out, and it’s left me frustrated, so I’ve dialed back down to the usual one day per week for June. We’ve been chronically low on volunteers since corona (I am told there was a waiting list before 2020, but that abundance was long gone by the time I started), which has meant that some of what we want to do hasn’t been getting done. By coming in more frequently, I was expecting to help us add some of that back in. What actually happened is that other volunteers often started calling to say they couldn’t make it on days when there was extra personpower. And that left me feeling taken advantage of.
An additional, unexpected downside was that with more volunteers there and thus a lighter per-person workload, the social chitchat level went up. I am not a chitchat person. I am all up for being there long hours to do the work that matters, but I am very much not up for being there to take a long lunch and spend time talking about unimportant things.
a little visualization porn for you
Inspired by @k1rsty’s chart, I created this overview of my own goals. Fun to make!
