# How I lost $50 down a slippery slope the other day

**URL:** <https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-i-lost-50-down-a-slippery-slope-the-other-day/5290>\
**Category:** Akrasia\
**Created:** [May 3, 2019, 9:03am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-i-lost-50-down-a-slippery-slope-the-other-day/5290 "2019-05-03T09:03:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![zedmango](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/c67d28/32.png) [@zedmango](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/zedmango)\
**Post date:** [May 4, 2019, 5:27am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-i-lost-50-down-a-slippery-slope-the-other-day/5290/3 "2019-05-04T05:27:38Z")

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I agree - I’m actually a big fan of goals of the form “start a 30-min timer for X” or “start doing activity X.” They’re great because 1) there’s much less resistance to starting something than there is to doing it, and 2) once I start, it’s easy to continue.

The problem here was that I not only had the start time too late in the day, but I had multiple goals all due at that time, leading to the failure where I couldn’t start them all that late.

So I’m thinking about staggering deadlines earlier in the day so there’s only one goal due at a time. That way I can make the goal “start X” without running into that problem.

I may also want two goals, one little one for “start X early in the day” and a big one for “finish X by the end of the day.” @phi discussed something similar:

> [@Narthur's Beeminder Journal](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/narthurs-beeminder-journal/4945/27):
>
> I have a rather big and intimidating goal and being the procrastinator that I am I tend to wait until the very last moment of the day to do it. Which would be less of a problem if the goal wasn’t to work multiple hours on my university project each day. So I create an earlybird goal that would make me do some of those hours before 1pm. That helped but added more housekeeping. Eventually I would then take a “break” directly at 1pm and that break would then last until the end of the day just in …

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