I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, and I’ve found lots of
things I think I’d be happier with if I tracked them on Beeminder :). But
I’m worried about overwhelming myself with goals. Has anyone experimented
with tracking lots of things and found it good, bad, or dependent on
something about your setup? I’m tracking about 10 goals and it doesn’t feel
overwhelming, but I can imagine getting tired of the kind where you have to
enter data yourself, and the things I want to add would be like that.
There was a good discussion of this question here on akratics,
which I think I mostly captured as the second half of this post: More Schwag, Less Beeminding | Beeminder Blog (search “excellent discussions” –
or if you’re trying to remember where the heck that post is later,
like I just was, googling “beeminder blog overwhelmed” should do it).
Beemind All The Things! BUT, keep everything dialed super
conservatively until you’re sure you have a handle on everything. Then
you can pick a couple things that you’re egregiously akratic about and
dial up just those. If you still have a handle on everything, try
dialing up something else.
I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, and I’ve found lots of
things I think I’d be happier with if I tracked them on Beeminder :). But
I’m worried about overwhelming myself with goals. Has anyone experimented
with tracking lots of things and found it good, bad, or dependent on
something about your setup? I’m tracking about 10 goals and it doesn’t feel
overwhelming, but I can imagine getting tired of the kind where you have to
enter data yourself, and the things I want to add would be like that.
I track lots of things – 26 active goals at the moment ( byorgey – dashboard – beeminder). It doesn’t feel overwhelming. Many of
them are things for which I have to enter data manually, but that’s really
not that bad. The trick is that when fighting akrasia one must also avoid
falling into that other vice with a Greek name, hubris. Flush with success
at a few goals, you imagine a super-version of yourself doing ALL THE
THINGS and BEING AWESOME and you add a ton of new goals, leading to lots of
anxiety, derailments, or both. (I speak from experience.) On top of
Daniel’s sage advice, I would add: don’t create too many new goals at once;
pace yourself to add them just a few at a time.
I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, and I’ve found lots of
things I think I’d be happier with if I tracked them on Beeminder :). But
I’m worried about overwhelming myself with goals. Has anyone experimented
with tracking lots of things and found it good, bad, or dependent on
something about your setup? I’m tracking about 10 goals and it doesn’t feel
overwhelming, but I can imagine getting tired of the kind where you have to
enter data yourself, and the things I want to add would be like that.
I have 40 goals at the moment but they vary in difficulty and purpose so
they’re not that hard to manage (and some overlap). I use the api to
visualize all of my goals organized the way I want to see them, though,
which makes it easier, but not by so much that I’d have any fewer goals if
I didn’t have it.
Actually, the overlapping goals are the hardest to manage because there are
some activities that I have to enter into 2 graphs and sometimes I forget.
It would be great if I could get one graph to pull from the other so I
wouldn’t have to do that anymore, but I haven’t had time to work out how to
get the api to do that for me yet. (E.g., I track my work hours, but also
my hours on specific projects. I’d love to enter 3 hours into Project X and
have it also add that point to Work without my having to remember to do it.)
On Wednesday, December 18, 2013 1:39:48 PM UTC-5, Brent Yorgey wrote:
I track lots of things – 26 active goals at the moment ( byorgey – dashboard – beeminder). It doesn’t feel overwhelming. Many
of them are things for which I have to enter data manually, but that’s
really not that bad. The trick is that when fighting akrasia one must also
avoid falling into that other vice with a Greek name, hubris. Flush with
success at a few goals, you imagine a super-version of yourself doing ALL
THE THINGS and BEING AWESOME and you add a ton of new goals, leading to
lots of anxiety, derailments, or both. (I speak from experience.) On top
of Daniel’s sage advice, I would add: don’t create too many new goals at
once; pace yourself to add them just a few at a time.
-Brent
On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 1:06 AM, Presley Pizzo <presl...@gmail.com<javascript:>
wrote:
I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, and I’ve found lots of
things I think I’d be happier with if I tracked them on Beeminder :). But
I’m worried about overwhelming myself with goals. Has anyone experimented
with tracking lots of things and found it good, bad, or dependent on
something about your setup? I’m tracking about 10 goals and it doesn’t feel
overwhelming, but I can imagine getting tired of the kind where you have to
enter data yourself, and the things I want to add would be like that.
Presley
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I would suggest that whatever you try, you set a firm data and some time
(in 1 month? 2 months? 6 months?) to re-evaluate your success, and whether
you feel like you need to track more, track less, or change what you are
doing in some other way. That will help avoiding possible the failure mode
of being overwhelmed by the system and disengaging with it all at once.
On Tuesday, December 17, 2013 1:06:30 AM UTC-5, Presley Pizzo wrote:
I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, and I’ve found lots of
things I think I’d be happier with if I tracked them on Beeminder :). But
I’m worried about overwhelming myself with goals. Has anyone experimented
with tracking lots of things and found it good, bad, or dependent on
something about your setup? I’m tracking about 10 goals and it doesn’t feel
overwhelming, but I can imagine getting tired of the kind where you have to
enter data yourself, and the things I want to add would be like that.