What are your working strategies for making sure you actually create Beeminder goals instead of putting it off?
I think it’s the kind of thing where you make yourself do it in the moment you think about it since it literally only takes a minute or two. If it requires configuration you can potentially adjust that later since even the existence of the goal will force your hand.
When I fail at a goal that I resisted creating a beeminder goal for, I try to remind myself that I was right in the first place to thinking about making a beeminder goal 
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Two goals of mine help with that somewhat:
- ASI - Actual Setup Improvements (1/(week)day) - modelled after beeminder’s own uvi; do one thing that improves my productivity setup every day
- Eat the frog (1/(week)day)- inspired by Brian Tracy’s Book; do that one thing that is most important that day (in my case this has developed to be the one thing that I can do on top of my responsibilities at work, which I’m fine with)
I just recently reinstated the frog goal and had great success with it.
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Oh, huh, how do you define “one thing that improves my productivity setup” in the day-to-day? What kinds of things count? Are there days when you look at things and think “nah this is good”?
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I basically count anything and everything that improves my abilities to do actual work (work in this case means things I need/want to do, not only my job). There are lots of new beeminder goals in my data, a new alarm clock app I installed, a plugin for my editor to make coding easier, but also a point for a special cleaning liquid for my jacket (since it’s easier for me to clean my jacket from here on out, this counts as well). It doesn’t need to be a big thing. But it shouldn’t be a routine/habit. So washing the dishes doesn’t count. Nor would buying cleaning liquid for my jacket again.
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Thinking about it for me it’s more clinging to the hope I can do it without the help of Beeminder that sometimes keeps me from creating goals and not so much procrastination. That’s also what kept me from starting to beemind years ago.
That’s exactly how far I got. But did it result in me then stopping what I was doing and make the goal? Nope. 
I like that idea a lot! I’m thinking of “wimp” for Workflow IMProvement though I really want to make it sound like “whim” because I really should be creating goals on a whim instead of not creating them at all.
I was actually thinking about creating a “check that you beemind what you need to beemind” meta goal once a week but wasn’t convinced this would actually work that well. But you sound like it does so I’ll give it a try!
Now I need a name for that goal. “api” for apiarist? Because it’s making sure my beehive is healthy? Hm no that metaphor doesn’t work… Though this could be a great name for some infrastructure monitoring service which would make sure the Beeminder servers are all swell and don’t – I dunno – forget to update their certificates or something 
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I frequently create goals with 30 day initial safety buffers. I can figure out my current slope without having to guess, and I can practice data entry before there’s any risk of a sting.
I have written about this before but I am on mobile and can’t quite find the link.
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I personally try to make my goals have a super conservative slope (e.g. study japanese for 5 minutes a day). With such an easy slope it is pretty easy to create the goal.
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I really like the ASI idea, as well as @phi’s weekly “hivecheck” goal!
For eat the frog - is this the thing where you choose the task the day before and then you have to do it that day? I have two goals for that - one for “choose tomorrow’s task” and one for “do the task I chose yesterday.”
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Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
Is a quote by(/attributed to) Mark Twain
if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment.
from Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time by Brian Tracy.
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Yes, I’m familiar with that, just wondering how @matti set it up and chooses the “frog.”
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I start my day and as soon as I figure out the frog for that day, I log a data point worth zero units with a comment describing that frog. When I have finished it, I edit the point to be worth 1 units. This means that it can take (almost) a whole day to come up with a frog. But so far the latest has been in the afternoon. Keep in mind though, that I just recently restarted the goal.
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I do something similar : in the morning I write down three goals for the day. Before bed I rate myself from to 0 to 3 on whether the goals were done. Goals can either be input (X hours on project Y) our output (finish this specific thing). I enter the score in a beeminder goal with a weekly rate of 18 points(out of 21), which allows me to partially fail every day (“3” days are quite rare) and not be too conservative on my goal setting.
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Seems like if you partially failed every day you’d have at most 14 out of 21. To get 18 you need 3/3 most days (at least 4 out of 7).
I allow myself decimals 
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