A couple of notes, trying to be of some help
- Sounds like you’re overcommitted (a day job and a masters-level thesis) which can easily create a vicious circle of procrastination and lack of focus. Which is how it ended up that you justify reporting Beeminder bugs as part of your project. Or spending time creating a Beeminder e-ink dashboard!
- A regular review of what your status is, if you’re achieving your goals and if you’re on the right path can help keep your priorities straight. Beeminder will not necessarily help you with that if the goals/metrics are not correctly set
- Creating multiple goals/metrics is perfectly fine (if not required for success), as well as dropping goals and creating new ones. The point is to move forward by any means that gets you to do to the work, and not to keep a Beeminder goal in the green
- Tools: RescueTime will cut off access to distracting sites and report time spent to Beeminder without any manual actions. You can also beemind time spent on separate categories of apps really easy. If you also need to track non-computer time, you can easily track offline time. As for pomodoros, I use PomoDone (https://pomodoneapp.com/) which also integrates with Beeminder via Zapier and has adjustable time settings (if you don’t like the 25’ default)
- It’s not about the tools: Achieving one’s goals is more about setting a set of priorities and realistic outcomes, and keeping these updated through a honest review process, rather having a magic software get you do to the stuff you want to do.
Hope any of this helps somehow