Introduction Thread: Getting to Know You!

[shanaqui]

A little while ago, a newbee suggested an introduction thread to help people jump into the forum, and I thought that sounded like a fun idea, and a nice way to help people join in and get to know other Beeminder users.

If you’d like to join in, feel free to share as much or as little about yourself and your goals as you want – but if you’d like some ideas, here’s what I came up with:

• The name you want people to use for you here
• The pronouns you want people here to use for you
• A link to your Beeminder gallery
• Your favourite goal (and why!)
• What do you use Beeminder for the most?
• Hobbies and interests

I’ll do mine in the first reply here, assuming no one beats me to it.

[shanaqui]

Name: Nicky, or shanaqui – either is fine
Pronouns: Any neutral, preferably they/them/their
Important: I am also the Support Czar of Beeminder, meaning I’m in charge of the support team and everything relating to support.
Beeminder gallery: Tada!
My favourite goal: shanaqui/clockoff

And why: It’s one of my longest-standing goals, I’d bet, and it’s one that’s been really helpful in sorting out my tendency to overwork. It’s been really good for me, and I also like the way I set up the goal and how it looks: I have access to custom goals with my Beemium subscription, so I made it a non-cumulative keep-under goal.
What I use Beeminder for: I think an apter question is what don’t I use it for. I use it for studying, chores, health stuff, hobbies, work…
Hobbies: Reading is my main hobby, but in the last couple of years I’ve also become an enthusiastic player of the massively multiplayer online game Final Fantasy XIV. I’m a gamer more generally as well, and play a range of different games… when I can tear myself away from Eorzea and the people I’ve met there.
I’d say by this point my studies are also a hobby: I’m currently studying for an MSc in Infectious Diseases, but have previously studied English Literature (BA and MA) and Natural Sciences (BSc). I’m sure this isn’t the last either. Other than that, I do crochet and cross-stitch sometimes, though lately haven’t had much time to do so, and I like playing card games with my wife and my sister if I can round them up.

[enbee]

hi, everyone! what a great idea! :)

• name: enbee (preferably, because of the pun) or mara (boring, because real name)
• pronouns: they/them
  (or other neural ones should be fine, too, but i find that’s always a subjective thing, too—for example, i find “fae” sounds rather feminine. long story short, any neopronoun is okay, but they/them is best/safest)
• beeminder gallery: click link
• favourite goal: i don’t want to feel bad right now, so i’ll say gmuns, which hasn’t derailed once yet!
  it’s keeping my unread emails in check (mostly). [it actually works wonderfully for actual unread emails in my inbox, it just lets me open a lot of emails on my thunderbird tab which i plan to get back to eventually but neglect most of the time … yes, i need another goal for this :p]
• what i use beeminder for: various things! work-related, uni-related, leisure-related, health-related (steps, fruits, veggies, flossing, …)
  i use it for pretty much everything so far, but haven’t figured out my ideal balance / goal types yet (does one ever? ;)
• hobbies and interests: languages (japanese and korean, currently), movies/series, game nights with friends, ttrpgs, (book) design, writing lettersemails to my future self (not affiliated with futureme.org, just a big fan), rambling a lot, gratitude journaling, …
  (okay, that last one especially is more a daily routine rather than hobby-hobby, but i’m proud of myself for sticking with it for over a year already without missing a day. i’m kind of hogging the thread currently.)

click here for visual proof that the forum doesn't want me to continue hogging the thread `:p`

if you’re active in the forum you’ll probably come across me, if only because i liked your post. (i like 99% of posts i read, and i think i might only have one thread muted?—liking is, among other things, a great way for my forgetful brain to see if i already read something!)

[byorgey]

Hi all!

• name: Brent, or byorgey is fine. Danny has been known to call me “Professor Yorgey”, and yes, Beeminder helped me get a PhD, but I don’t place too much stock in formal titles!
• pronouns: he/him
• beeminder gallery: here
• favorite goal: grading-zero – byorgey – beeminder . I get 1 point every day I get to “grading zero”, which is defined in the fine print but basically means I need to stay caught up with grading, one of those things that’s not too bad if you stay on top of it but quickly turns into a stressful, demoralizing fiasco if you get behind. The goal is nothing fancy but it’s resulted in a huge quality of life improvement for me!
• What I use Beeminder for: oh gosh, all the things.
• Hobbies and interests: Piano, reading (largely speculative and science fiction but a mix of other things as well), competitive programming, open source, mountain biking, language learning (Spanish, German, ancient Greek and Hebrew), Go

[dreev]

Thanks so much for putting this together, @shanaqui! <3

I’m Danny or dreev (I’m sometimes called the latter even IRL) and am a cofounder of Beeminder, along with @bee who might be too shy for threads like this.

Of course I have a fairly extensive Beeminder gallery but not as extensive as some people. I use it for work, workouts, eating, reading, communications, you name it.

A few of my favorite goals right now:

1. mathingbee: for filling pages of math with Bee – just whatever puzzles we come across or things we want to teach each other
2. freshgish: for cycling through and curating GitHub issues (I actually have a bunch of these, for different repositories, like my personal task list, household tasks, my and Bee’s “relationship repo”, long story)
3. blarticle: for not letting my Pocket backlog get out of hand

(I also have an RSSminder goal for posting here in the forum but it’s clearly not pushing me very hard. Dialing that up a bit now! It was actually my mustdo goal that got me to get in here and post this.)

Hobbies and interests: math puzzles and bike racing and inline skating and back-country skiing and prediction markets and voting/decision mechanisms.

[poisson]

• Name: Sean, but poisson is fine.
• pronouns: he/him
• gallery: here, although some of my most important current goals (toggl goals for time spent working on specific projects) are hidden, and some others have cryptic names
• favourite goal: Kind of hard to answer, because I’ve kind of been in a beeminder slump for a while now I think. It’s currently archived, but I think my favourite goal is still nonfiction, which added up the pages read on all my nonfiction reading goals in order to make sure I made a goal to read a new book after finishing the previous one (as simple as it is, just proud of my own metaminding script). I have high hopes that I will break out of my slump and get a new favourite goal out of the anti-smartphone goal I made for May’s new month’s resolution, however…
• What I use beeminder for: in the past year, toggl goals have been the most consistent players, with some for work and some for hobbies. Historically I had exercise goals as well as weight loss and calorie goals, and nonfiction reading, and lots of flossing / waking up / going to bed kind of goals. I have a huge list of archived goals. Perhaps this is a sign I need to get better at making goals stick…
• Hobbies: Piano, cooking, video games, ttrpgs, reading, learning japanese, manga, anime, scanlation.

[johnmarkos]

Name: John or Nhoj — either is fine: my family calls me John Markos because there are multiple Johns. I picked up the nickname Nhoj in fourth grade, and it stuck through high school. I’ve revived it in adulthood, and I also own the domain nhoj.com
Pronouns: He/him but any pronoun is okay with me
Beeminder gallery: here it is
My favorite goal: Right now, it’s PT exercises (for my back), because it has gotten me to go from zero times a week to . . . more than zero times a week, which seems good.
What do you use Beeminder for the most? Tracking habits that I probably wouldn’t do regularly if it weren’t for Beeminder. I use Beeminder combined with Boss as a Service to make my goal accountability close to automatic.
Hobbies: running, cycling, dancing, making and consuming music and art, public speaking.
Interests: I’ll give anything a chance, but I prefer stuff that makes me think. I listen to a lot of podcasts while I’m cleaning, commuting, or exercising, and I’ve been an avid listener to The 80,000 Hours Podcast from the beginning. I also like Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg. Lately, because I’ve had AI on the brain, I’ve been listening to The Dwarkesh Podcast and Cognitive Revolution a lot.
Miscellaneous: I went to St. John’s College where we all read the Great Books of Western Civilization and talked about them in discussion classes, but then I somehow wound up a software engineer, probably because I’ve always been a huge nerd.

[johnmarkos]

Just a couple other things about my use of Beeminder that I should mention.

1. I eliminated all of my $0 goals, but I find that $5 is a sweet spot for balancing loss aversion against the need for sleep. The exception is my sleep goal, where I decided to let the max derailment amount rise. I think I’ve been undervaluing sleep for many years, and I really want to fix that.
2. I like 12 noon local time as the derailment time, so I don’t have to choose between sleep and my goal. I can go to bed early, get up early, and still complete my day’s goal.
3. All my goals either update automatically or through Boss as a Service.
4. I turn on no excuses mode on all goals, so forgetting to add data is never an issue.

[dreev]

This is such a good thread. I’m not sure if this thread should continue indefinitely or if we should make new ones from time to time. In any case, here are intro questions we’ve used on the Discord in the past, in case they inspire anyone else to chime in:

1. What’s your Beeminder username and how long ago did you sign up? (Or say so if you’d rather be more anonymous than that.)
2. Any favorite things to beemind / killer Beeminder graphs / general areas of life you beemind?
3. What are your top three productivity tools?
4. How much have you coughed up on your highest derailment? (Also optional if you’re shy but we probably especially want to hear if the answer is “embarrassingly much”!)

[shanaqui]

This prompted me to check, and I’ve been a user since 2014! And a workerbee since 2018.

[willit]

Oh hey, I think I was that new user, but of course it took me a while to finish my original message and I didn’t notice this thread before posting there: Welcome to the Beeminder Forum (I’ve never been a big forum user, still some reflexes to build I guess)

So I’m moving my post here (hardly any changes, and added a tl;dr)

Indeed I saw introduction threads on other forums and find it cool if newcomers (and old-timers ) can share more specifically what brought them over
Happy it’s working!

About me (you can call me Willit): of course I’m akratic, and I’ve been having trouble since I started (and ended up partly flunking) college. I do wish I had discovered Beeminder then, as I was trying many different ways to get myself to work regularly and not get distracted, but the tricks I tried would always end up failing a few weeks after setting them up (although I maybe would have had trouble admitting I needed such an “extreme” system as Beeminder at the time).

I’ve now been using Beeminder since end of March, and I’ve definitely already seen the benefits: doing more things, and better managing to align my expectations with what I actually can do (which has always been an enormous source of demotivation for me).

What convinced me of starting?
A particularly bad period, and Beeminder’s transparency (the post listing all competitors contributed a lot for example).
I set up very early 2 “meta” goals, and those have probably prevented me from dropping out altogether from Beeminder: beexpert (a goal to read the Beeminder blog articles) and goaladder (a goal to add goals).

A few discoveries:
why the Seinfeld chain fails (I beleived in this until the first time I derailed)
typebee: Which personality traits are required to be a user of Beeminder. I better understood my feelings about Beeminder and why others could be less interested (see below)

I’m as well thinking about ways my beeminding experience could improve (may it be addressable at my level or Beeminder’s level). Right now, here is what I have in mind and would like to work on:

• Set up goals in a smarter way. I’m currently quite constantly gritting my teeth on the constraints Beeminder enforces, but it may be because I don’t have the choice and I hate that (however I’m of course happier in the long run). And example of a smarter goal: the “mustdo”. This has been a very stimulating goal and I feel the one with the most positive impact, but if you had asked me ahead of time I would have had a hard time guessing this.
• Have decreasing pledge levels after a certain amount of time. I think it would be the fair thing to do, but I do understand it may represent a financial loss for Beeminder [EDIT: I now understand it’s maybe the oposite. See shortcircuit]. I think that’s a very interesting topic, and was about to search for discussions or posts when I read… somewhere that the feature was being considered (and now I can’t find where anymore).
• Figure out ways to allow more human support between us users. I know how much this can help, and on the other hand I often feel quite alone behind my beeminder dashboard. I did talk about it to some friends, but I’ve most of the time had either questionning, puzzled or vaguely uninterested reactions (I totally understand that, and it may be a culture thing in France too. Yup I’m French.). I of course have some more precise ideas, but I’m not sure what would be feasible and would work. Something really close actually: those online rooms. I’ll have to try!
• Use tagtime. That’s such a cool idea, and I’d like to test it, but I need dig the subject more.
• Have a way of sharing a goal in an anonymous way. There are a few people around me I’d like to not share my beeminder username with, but still show how things work and share a goal or two; for example at my job where I don’t wont people to be able to see all my goals. I know there are private goals, but I think keeping them public is a bit more useful to talk about them in the community here.
• Maybe a calendial goal ? But this system seems a bit complicated to me

I’ll be very happy to browse through the forum for those subjects and chip in where I find them, or create as needed new threads.
If you already want to start, don’t wait for me and feel free to open whatever is needed and/or tag me there (I may not be very very fast at it, I’m quite busy in the coming 2 months).

Thanks for reading!

tl;dr : I’m an akratic who’s had trouble for years, and now Beeminder seems to work I’ve still got some frustrations and plenty of ideas, among which: auto-decreasing pledges, trying the intend rooms, finding a way to share a goal anonymously (i.e. no tracing back to the username), wanting to set up tagtime and maybe a calendial goal.

[brittany1243]

Hi everyone!

• Name: Brittany
• Pronouns: she/her
• Gallery
• My favorite goal is an archived Toggl time goal for time spent studying for my oral qualifying exam for my PhD in math.

The “oral qual” is an eighty minute exam where you answer questions and solve problems on a blackboard in front of a committee of four professors. I passed the day after I hit the goal target, and the exam went so well that by the end we were adventuring off my submitted syllabus !

This goal was preceded by a goal to specifically study my neglected secondary topic: three derails in quick succession showed me that I needed to make some major changes to my work priorities to stay on track for the exam. I derailed on that goal eight times total, then on the pictured goal three times. It was so worth it to have the sting at these moments, rather than at the exam.

• What do you use Beeminder for the most? Health, for sure! (Exercise, eat fruit, take an algae oil supplement, stretch, do push-ups…) It’s still a work in progress to figure out how to Beeminder the PhD now that I’m in the research phase.

• Hobbies and interests: Weight-lifting, my cat Noel, learning how to do handstands, plants, coffee shops, Chinese language.

[byorgey]

@brittany1243

the exam went so well that by the end we were adventuring off my submitted syllabus

Fantastic! What’s your research area / area of specialty?

[brittany1243]

Thanks! My speciality is dynamical systems studied from the perspective of data and algebraic topology. My first two projects were about using machine learning to make higher dimensional applications more feasible. Right now I’m working on applications to safety in robotics/ML.

[lcso]

Hello, my name is lcso (or Lucas), and I’ve tried Beeminding doing stretches for a little while. But I was derailing very often and I started weaseling sometimes. So after derailing some times, I archived my goal. Still checking in with the blog but not really using the service for around half a year.

In the meantime I started using Focusmate, which helped me out a lot with concentration. I didn’t really need beeminder’s intergration to book sessions, until now because it’s summer break, and I want to keep working in stuff instead of being a couch potato.

I’m planning on doing (on average) at least 30 minutes of focused work per day. And it’s been going well so far.

I’m planning on using Beeminder to use Todoist again, because I’ve been paying the subscription, but I’ve barely been using it. It just turns into the list of existencial dread after a while. And Ideally I’d like to start doing stretches again, but everytime I was delaying them till midnight. And hastely doing the bare minimum, or weaseling.

As for hobbies, I study graphic design, and I like exploring niche online communities, and diving into online rabbit holes. I enjoy programming and tackling technical problems. Watching movies, playing boardgames with friends, and messing around with computers.

[johnmarkos]

Not sure where else to put this, but a couple of years ago, I watched the Matthew Dicks TEDx talk Homework for Life, forgot about it, and didn’t do anything about it. Then, today, I went back and re-watched the video. He mentioned that he keeps his story-worthy ideas in an Excel spreadsheet. It occurred to me that this mini-journal is an excellent use case for Beeminder, and I can keep the story-worthy ideas in the Beeminder entry comments!

I just thought I’d share that in case anyone else wants to try a similar Beeminder.