I did something similarly amorphous, beeminding “time spent per day” as the metric, for completing my phd. It worked really well, I think in part because the thesis was well-defined and had no intermediate deadlines, so as long as I got everything done by the do-or-die date, it didn’t matter what I worked on first. So, sure, I started with the easy stuff like “copy published papers into google doc”, but eventually all that was left was obnoxious things like citations and formatting images to fill up my time quota. And I got done with 3 days to spare, so I count it a success!
Sadly the same technique hasn’t been as useful for my work-work in my Real Job, I suspect because lack of clear work definitions means that I can spend basically an infinite amount of time on the “easy” work, and never get to the hard-but-important stuff.
In contrast, I tried a more structured way of beeminding the nebulous “scrapbooking”: i tried to assign point values to things like “sort photos” and “write journaling” and set the slope such that i would accomplish a page a week. It didn’t really work, again because i ended up doing “easy” point items like downloading and sorting photos, and never found the time blocks to do hard things like editing.
Clearly there’s a pattern here, where (for me) beeminding nebulous tasks works better when they have well-defined boundaries. That means I suspect ‘do taxes’ would beemind well for me, whereas ‘fix neurosis’ would not. On the other hand, ‘find new therapist’ probably would be beemindable (…and hey, I should set that up).