Sometimes overwhelming! It’s about the point at which I usually take stock and prioritise and potentially close some of the goals down. But mostly having a lot of goals doesn’t feel any particular way, I suppose.
I’d say I have four categories of goals: work, reading, health, and other. The work/reading/health goals are pretty constant as categories, while other stuff comes and goes. The other category includes stuff like my chores goal, my goal for checking in with friends, study goals, FFXIV goals, gratitude journal… it’s a catch-all for all kinds of things, and goals tend to come and go. The other categories tend to be steadier and contain my longest-running goals.
I have some automated goals, but I have a high value for manual goals, where I have to think of them and consciously add data. Some of my automated goals kind of run the risk of me not realising how much safety buffer I’m losing or gaining.
I would say that for the most part, the problem I’m personally trying to solve with Beeminder is not akrasia (though it is something that comes up now and again), but how I weight the importance of my time or tasks given that they’re all important to me in different ways. and the importance of each goal can fluctuate. For example, I have a goal not to snack after 9pm, but I also have a goal for eating a live yoghurt every day. If they’re both due to derail, which do I pick? Beeminder makes that choice very explicit: I can each time pick to eat the yoghurt (it’s more important) while being reminded that the 9pm endtime for snacks still exists [ETA: corrected typo/unfinished thought] and there’s a long-term cost to flouting it (symbolised by the short-term $5 cost). The externalising of costs is what helps me, because I have so many things I love to do or want to do or need to do,and I need ways to help me prioritise. Sometimes it’s genuinely more important that I play some FFXIV than that I study, for mental health reasons, for instance – but the sting reminds me of the cost of that choice.
(I do still find the akrasia horizon helpful because it also enforces a cooldown time on changing priorities. It makes the choice more significant than just one evening deciding I don’t want to stop snacking at 9pm anymore.)
I do regularly retire goals, though. Because I do a weekly review, I’m fairly constantly evaluating what serves me, what’s working, what isn’t.
It feels like it doesn’t take much time for me, but I’m aware it’s more time than other people would like to spend on it, if that makes sense! I use zzq’s browser extension, which allows me to “collapse” any goal to the bottom of the list. Each day I uncollapse all of them, and work my way through the list, “touching” each one – that could be only long enough to collapse it, or it could mean going and doing the task and entering the data. That means I usually have a good idea of the safety buffer I have, what’s due today, what’s due soon, etc.