Halflight - beeminder journal

Life
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I’ve been testing the waters for a few weeks now, and thought it might help me to keep a journal of my findings.All my goals have a cap on $5 for now, I’m already motivated by merely the thought of derailing.

My initial motivation for starting with beeminder was toothbrushing. I was unable to get it over once a day for longer periods. And started a bit optimistically with a goal that forced me to brush twice a day for six days, and three times a day on one day (measured as (6*2 + 3)/7).

Now I just keep it to twice a day, to cut myself some slack. I haven;t derailed yet - but had quite a few days that I really had to stick to it to prevent derailing. If I ever get to the green line, I will make the slope steeper (not sure how much yet, but enough to make sure I’ll eventually drop back to blue - to prevent slacking. To make things easier, I made an ios shortcut that will log if I brushed for breakfast or lunch. And an automation that will automatically log dinner, because I already have a healthy evening routine.

My second goal was weight. There’s a big choir performance coming up, and I want to feel good about my look (I’m short and a bit overweight). Initially I had 2 kg buffer, but past me was very optimistic about how well it would go and ratcheted a lot away within a few days. Now it’s about between + 0.2 and 0.6 , so I’ll probably derail.

But that’s fine. Should I derail, I’ll get my original buffer back. In the meantime, I paused the goal, to a point that I should have my buffer back if I keep making healthy choices. I hope that’ll do the trick, but else I’ll derail in a week (that’s the max I go without weighing).

My strategy on this goal is: walk at least 6000 steps a day, complete my activity rings on the apple watch without lowering them and don’t take too much sugar (drinks / candy) and unhealthy snacks. I have no complementary weigh-in goal, but that’s ok. My scale is connected to apple health, so as soon as I step on it, beeminder knows.

My third goal is also choir related. I want to practice at least three times a week. At first I created an ios shortcut that made me log all the details about amount of minutes and the type of practicing (choreography, just listening to the audio, singing with sheet music or just reading sheetmusic / lyrics). It went ok, untill I made a separate choreo goal. That made me stressed instead of motivated. Now I just log the amount of times with as aggday non-zero.

I can enter the data manually. But if I open an app that I solely use for choir, streaks will log my progress too. In the evening, as I open beeminder, the automation will check if I completed my goal, and if so, log it automatically. Because of the non-zero aggday I will only create more buffer if I start practicing more days. For now I aim to keep the goal blue.

My final goal is screentime related. I find myself doomscrolling too much, so I log my browsertime for phone and tablet with an ios shortcut. I use it next to ios screentime, to make sure I actually stick to it. As a bonus I switched my phone browser to firefox focus, and gradually switch it on my tablet too. This means I’m adjusting the screentime settings for amount of time on normal browser daily, and the total amount of time weekly.

Luckily I have made two ios shortcuts to help me calculate the required amount and the total current amount.

That’s it for now. Maybe I’ll create a goal about grocery shopping or beeminder posts. Nothing too hard, but to encourage myself to drop by on the forum if I need anything and make sure I’ll never find an empty fridge if I want to start cooking. But I tried more than four goals, and up until now, I always found myself deleting them again within a few days. Let’s see how it goes!

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By the way - in my introduction post I mentioned scrolls too - for browsing on the phone in general. I replaced it with allowing less screentime for my browser on my phone before I max out on all browsing time. And I’ll ratchet that goal and match screentime settings to it - when it’s ridiculously easy to get to the goal for more than 2 weeks. The comment of the data shows how many hours / minutes for each device, so it’s easy to see if I’m not setting myself up for a disaster :sweat_smile: .

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This is often so powerful! It can get difficult to always have your goal in the red/never feel like there’s an easy win, so making sure there’s a little bit of slack in the goal really helps, even if it’s just a little. And there’s always ratcheting if you build up too much safety buffer but don’t want to make the goal harder.

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Yeah I tried - but as for losing kg’s it’s the worst thing to do :sweat_smile:. That’s a lot harder to keep up to - I found that the first weight losing is the easiest, and every value within 2kg range is possible when you have a ‘good’ day followed by a ‘bad’ day. So I’ll never touch it again for my weight.

But for the other goals it’s an option.

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Still wondering if it’s the right way of logging for screentime. I made a little iOS shortcut that lets me log

  • if I browsed at night
  • if I tampered with browsing restrictions on my pc or devices
  • I I overruled iOS screentime settings
  • If I ate dinner or daytime meals without screens
  • My own feeling about today rated 0-10

This generates a rating between 0 and 5. I must score 3 to pass.

I’ll try both for a couple of days, maybe I’ll archieve the original screentime goal for a while - as it’s a lot of work to log and adjust. In the meantime this way lets me finetune iOS screentime every week without any hassle.

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Oops. Had a bad night. Not the best start for this new goal, but I refuse to start with a clean slate. Just serves as a very good reminder why I shouldn’t go on a browsing spree at night. I spent more than my screentime allowance and installed another dedicated app to avoid using my browser. So I defined two extra rules:

  • installing an app while browser has same functionality counts as breaking screentime
  • a day starts after I get up (specifically: 7:30 AM) so that I won’t start a day in the negative

For yesterday it meant I had to log 1.4, as I didn’t break blocking apps and thought I scored 4/10. Everything else didn’t work

Now I re-installed Offscreen, to warn me from using all my browsing minutes at night.

I’m not entirely happy with the choir goal anymore. Maybe I should lower Streaks too. Or do something else that makes it more worth it to practice.

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Even though I was about to archieve the screentime goal, I still filled it in today. And derailed. I dreaded as much when I saw the screentime yesterday after lunch and couldn’t be bothered to recalculate how I should adjust iOS screentime.

But somehow it feels actually good to own it. How easy it would have been to say: nah, not going to add any data today. Or just fudge it a bit because screentime didn’t work entirely as intended. However - I could have prevented this easily by adjusting iOS screentime - or go looking for some other way to pass time. Just makes me rethink about archieving. Maybe I’ll keep it after all.

It’s like some sort of tax on how I spend my time.

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My goals are doing good today.

Screentime-hours was a valuable lesson. I went to the guests room, because I couldn’t sleep, and on purpose didn’t take my phone with me. Normally I would - I listen to some music podcast to help me sleep. But as it was 5 AM already, I just knew I would go for some browsing if I did. Maybe I’ll look for a podcast app on my Apple Watch- then I can have the music without the browsing trap.

The screentime-rating app makes me more aware of some other habits as well. I intentionally uninvited my phone and browser for dinner. It feels good to have an extra incentive here. From today, I’ll see what the blocking app does too. It makes sure I won’t cheat the hours goal.

Yesterday was logged as 4.1. I rated 6/10 did almost everything: no phone in bed, no iOS screentime or blocking app adjusted, no phone at dinner. It feels almost too easy - but no phone at dinner is still hard. And having a bad (sleepless) night invites all kinds of rule breaking. I’ll see how I feel about this in a month.

Weight is doing good. Currently on BMI 24.8. More than 1 KG below my goal for today. I’m not doing anything extreme to get there. But replacing some food and drink choices with healthier ones pays off. The small break helps too, maybe. But I’ll keep monitoring it. At least weekly.

Brushing tooth is fine. I had one weekend day when I didn’t brush after breakfast or lunch, but today I’ll do both to make up for it. My intention is to try to push that line to green, without making it harder.

Choir: automations adjusted. Now everything should log effortlessly. I’m wondering if I should change the aggday to sum, but that gives me too much room to cheat. So I’ll just stick to this.

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Same for me, so I don’t have a real weight goal anymore. You can see the historical fluctuation on the goal’s statistics page, as 90% variance. Mine is 0.9kg, or about 8% of my current mass.

Weighing regularly helps awareness which then has a chance to influence behaviour, so a meta goal that gets a +1 every time you weigh yourself can help. (Choose Beeminder as the data source new goal.)

You’ll find loads of weight-loss discussion on here, but a lot of it boils down to goals to improve the inputs rather than the outcomes. e.g. steps per day, days without carbs, time spent exercising

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Yeah, I rather not put some extra pressure on it. :sweat_smile:

When I have enough buffer, I’ll probably weigh more often. But I know it won’t help me right now, since I’m already very well looking after my eating and activity habits. Beeminding my weight is more like a compass, and an incentive to be careful with the sugar and fat intake. And it’s very easy to track. I either meet the goal, or I don’t.

If I stop weighing altogether, I’ll derail soon enough anyway.

Still thanks for pointing out the possibility of tracking beeminder itself and the discussions on weight though, I’ll dive into it.

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On beeminding weight…

I’ve been thinking a bit about this for a day. When I made my goal, I had a few reasons for wanting to beemind it.

  • My BMI indicated that I was overweight, which made me concerned about my health.
  • Up until I was a young adult, I used to be thin (BMI < 20).
  • Because I’m small, I’ll look heavy easily.
  • I feel like I don’t look like myself on stage, because of that.

So I set a beeminder, targeted to a weight that wasn’t impossible (BMI 23.15), but definitely would make some impact. Now that I’ve been with this goal for a month, I see some changes already. Both on the scale and how my clothes look on me. But I also feel some anxiety about the pace that I have to keep up with to prevent derailing. I regretted not setting the goal to 2 kg above my original value.

As mentioned, I could have logged input instead of output. But the scale doesn’t lie, and a lot of activity-based logging doesn’t work for me, because of other health issues. On top of that, I’m too lazy to log food / drinks - so yeah, it has to be weight.

Still, something felt off. I mentioned before I wanted beeminder as a compass, not as a threat. And while the stakes are still low, I knew something needed to change. Yes, I want to lose weight. Yes, I don’t want to see the numbers I left behind back anytime soon. But the big choir performance happens only once in three years and I don’t want to go back to were I was after that. So I reformulated my goal.

“I want to gradually lose weight. Before the choir performance, I want a hard cap on my current weight - 1 kg, to make sure I won’t see the high numbers back again. In the end I want to keep a healthy weight, beneath BMI 24”.

I see the flaws of using output, but I hope to reduce them. Now I can log every day without pushing too hard, but in the end I’ll still meet my goal.

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Yesterday was a bit of a screentime trap - as it was too hot to do anything outside. I noticed in time to prevent myself from derailing with browsing - so that part works. But it was a very close call, and I noticed that I switched to other apps.

The rating says I was a bit off too - the only box I could tick tonight was no phone in the bedroom. Today I’ll try my best to do it all: no disabling of screentime and blocking settings, no phone during daytime meals and dinner and no phone in the room. With some mindful tech usage today I might approach a full score - even though rating myself 10/10 is impossible unless I have a real tech detox day.

Tooth brushing is good, I’ll try for 3 times today again. I love how I finally manage to stick to at least two times, with Beeminder as a help.

Weight is fine - I’ll try every other day now.

Maybe today it’s time to practice some choir. That’s still falling behind a bit. I guess I should create an extra timer goal for it after all, and link it to an x times / week goal.

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I’ve been thinking a bit about my goals. Weight is still going strong, slowly but steadily I keep approaching my goal. I’m weighing myself about 3 times / week. Sometimes it’s 0,5 kg higher, sometimes 0,5 kg lower. But clearly cutting out the chocolate, candy and sugary drinks is paying off.

Brushing my teeth is great too - I actually have increased it to brush 3 times on one day, and add one more day now.

As for browsing: the browsing goal itself feels like a bit of nonsense. I barely come close to the deadline and it’s not helping anything to fill in daily. I started the archive process yesterday, but maybe I should just log weekly and use the average of all week. Then I still have some guideline, but no daily obligation.

Screen time rating has had a bit of a review.

I have a rating from 1 - 5 based on

  • if I browsed before 7:30 AM
  • If I broke screentime restrictions
  • if I used my phone during daytime meals
  • if I used my phone during dinner
  • An own rating that takes into account how I felt about my screen usage.

Choir: still not sure about the best approach. One day I want to log time and the other just the effort of rehearsing. For now I’ll just log efforts, as times / week means more consistency.

Summary: I try to keep logging as easy as possible and not measure one objective with two goals. Because they’re so tied that if one fails, the other probably as well, and it’s just extra work. My goal for next weeks is keep the goals just as they are right now and stick to it - the tooth brushing goal and weight goal show that it works already.

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