Hey, I’m Tom (gallery here). I found about Beeminder from somewhere in the broader rationalist blogosphere (maybe Neel Nanda?) and I’ve finally taken the plunge and started a couple goals. TBH I got sold on this mostly by the many excellent and detailed posts on the blog, lots of great stuff on there.
- Goals: (I only have 3 at the moment so I guess I don’t need to pick favourites)
blogpost: Posting to my blog at least once a week. Not quite ready to take Scott Alexander’s advice and post daily, but maybe someday!digitalcleanup: Unsubscribing from/deleting stuff. I’ve already cut down my active internet usage quite a lot over the last several years, but there’s still a lot of cruft in my inbox and my PC that I want to clean up.wordcount: Using the Obsidian Plugin to track words written in Obsidian (though the plugin only seems to work with one file at a time at the moment, and I’d rather have it track the entire vault). This is a catch-all for a bunch of writing stuff I want to do: note taking, journaling, blog post ideas, maybe even longer form fiction writing? I’m drafting this very post in Obsidian right now even.
The slopes for these are pretty shallow at the moment but I’ll probably try dialling/ratcheting it up once I get into a routine.
- Potential Goals:
- Obviously ‘write more’ is a big overarching aim for me. I’m still mostly writing into the void right now, but maybe I could find places to discuss things I’m interested in. Problem is quality online communities are hard to find (though this place seems nice!) and I feel like I need a good ‘reason’ to post which ends up being quite a big barrier.
- Reading isn’t really something I need to dig up motivation for (I’ve already archive binged the Beeminder blog archive lol), but goals for finding new sources or diving into an unfamiliar topic would be good.
- Languages: Apart from English I know moderate Japanese and basic Mandarin. Maybe I need to dig up the old Anki decks again? Also I massively neglected speaking practice so motivation there would be good.
- Mundane day to day life stuff: Exercising, getting out of the house, finding events to go to etc.
- Work stuff: Professional development stuff, coding/DevOpsing outside of work, something something AI