Wow, two and a half years since I last posted in this thread. High time for an update.
Current goals
Over the years my goals have come and gone, but there’s one that’s been around since my first day as a Bee-minder: weight. It’s one of my two purely quantified-self goals; I’ve never used the information to steer my weight, though I suppose that would change if I ever crossed the hard edge. (I started tracking to see how menopause would affect my weight. Five and a half years later, I’m firmly past the transition and it’s safe to say it hasn’t had the effect I expected. Thanks for the genes, paternal grandmother!) It’s super-gratifying to see all those datapoints.
My other QS goal is 30-books. It has a non-zero slope, but I’m such a reader that the only danger of derailing is me forgetting to enter a datapoint. I adore having a list of all the books I’ve read in the past three and a half years. (Well, most of them; I took two breaks, but missed having the record so much that I’ve always restarted.)
I have one punitive goal: junk-free. (Guess how I feel about this goal. I mean, it’s no more punitive than my Do Mores with bracing non-zero slopes.) So far so good, but it’s a pretty new goal and I’ve tried this in the past and always ended up archiving it. Yet hope is a beautiful quality in a human being and nothing ventured is nothing gained, a ship is safe in harbor but that’s not what ships are for, et cetera and so forth.
I have one other goal to handle unpleasantries: frogs-ifttt. This is also the first of my autodata goals—I am a biiiiig fan of autodata. It isn’t entirely automatic; I manually enter to-dos in iOS Reminders and manually check them off, but IFTTT does the heavy lifting from there. Which feels very autodata-y because I was already using Reminders this way anyway. The only tweak is that now I start each reminder with a number to represent my perceived friction, from 1 (put on a load of laundry) to 3 (do my husband’s quarterly bookkeeping).
steps-garmin was my successful Survivor Challenge goal from 2019. It was madly successful—I racked up over a month of safety buffer near the end—in large part because I discovered StepBet in January of that year. You put in 40 bucks and promise to hit your daily goals every day for six weeks—no buffer here. Miss a single day and your 40 bucks goes poof; make it to the end, and you get your ante back plus a share of the pot from all those who didn’t make it. Turns out this is hugely, hugely motivating. (I could write a whole post on why I think this is, but short version: it’s both carrot and stick.) It’s not a day job, but I did earn over 200 bucks in 2019… by doing something I wanted to accomplish. This is, in a very real and literal sense, free money.
I started a full-time job on January 1, 2020 (after 17 years working from home), so I waved a sad temporary goodbye to StepBet while I sorted out what my new day looked like, and dropped my daily goal from 10,500 to 6,000 for 2020. I’m still sorting it out, and now that corona’s hit I’ll probably wait until things go back to normal (if that’s where they go) before rejoining StepBet.
Last but not least, I have six project goals + one project meta-tracker to track total hours spent on all projects together. I plan to gradually add more projects (and am keeping a list of candidates), and to gradually up the rates. That’s one lesson I’ve learned: don’t start at 60 mph. Start at 2 mph and build up some early success (and a habit).
After initial setbacks I figured out how to autodatify these goals. They, too, are ultimately manual (steps-garmin is my only truly-autodata goal), but I’ve hit on a setup that works very well. I use Toggl to track time for each project, and I set up Siri shortcuts in the Toggle iPhone app so that adding data is as simple as telling Siri to start and stop tracking. A single tag used for every project feeds that same data to the meta-tracker. As a bonus, I have a lovely visual project record in Toggl.
And now I get to check this baby off:
