Hello! I’m kind of the opposite of a newbee: I believe I opened my beeminder account in 2012. But I’ve never posted on the forum before, and although I always really liked the concept of beeminder and have had a few slightly abortive bouts of tracking stuff with it over the last 14 years (!), I would say I didn’t really start getting earnest use out of it until sometime around a year ago. Better late than never to figure my shit out or to say hello, right?
At the moment I’m beeminding:
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chores — this has been running since July 2025 and has been very successful. It requires me to complete any 2 tasks from my “Chores and house maintenance” project on Todoist per day. Most of these, obviously, are recurring tasks. Some of them are much lower-hanging fruit than others and I very frequently push the ones I don’t want to do further into the future, but I get to them eventually and on the whole I keep my environment significantly nicer, most of the time, than before I was beeminding this. I’ve had a few derails, but none recently. I’ve never changed the slope (other than scheduling breaks to go on holiday), but I’ve recently changed the way I organise my chore todos a little bit and I think I might actually want to make it a little steeper as a result.
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declutter — not a subset of chores, but a separate project to get rid of Unneeded Stuff from one area of my house every so often (I have the rate set to 0.04 per day). I am kind of weaselly about this goal; I frequently let it get very close to derailing and then pick something close to unreasonably easy as my “area”, such as a single drawer. However, this is still a lot more decluttering than I’d probably get done if I gave up on this goal, so I let myself get away with it! I’m not very clutterbuggy by nature, but my house is small and stuff does gradually accumulate if I don’t fight against it. This goal has been running since January this year and I recently made the slope shallower because I was feeling like I might run out of areas that could beneficially be decluttered, so it’s been doing its job alright enough.
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todoistzero — in some ways a misnomer, because I don’t require myself to complete all my Todoist tasks (or even all the Todoist tasks I had scheduled for the day) in order to get a datapoint for this. I just require myself to clear out the “Today” list by some means, which nearly always involves postponing or skipping the recurrence of at least a couple of tasks. The benefit is that I actually review my tasks and consider when I might do them, I’m very aware of the things I keep putting off (which is step one towards not doing that!), and I don’t accumulate way overdue tasks, throw up my hands and give up on using Todoist altogether. I operationalise this by having a Todoist project called “Zero tracker” containing a single task that recurs every day. I tick it off iff / as soon as it’s the only task remaining in my “Today” list. So there’s one datapoint available per day, and the goal asks 0.9 of me, so I can accumulate some buffer and slip up now and then. The goal has been running since January this year; I’ve had a few derails, including a little spate of them sometime in the summer, but I’ve been doing very well on it lately.
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bedtime — go to bed by 22:30, at least 80% of the time. I’m having mixed success on this one. I derailed on it just a couple of days ago, not for the first time since August when I set it up; but the bigger problem is that it’s only correlated with my actual goal of keeping a regular sleep schedule with ideal sleeping hours of, like 22:30 to 06:30. It definitely is correlated, so I don’t find it useless; but nothing about this goal stops me from getting into bed at 22:29 sharp and then scrolling rubbish on my phone until 1am. Sleep is a real issue for me and a bit complicated. I would probably like to add another goal to complement this one; maybe one to do with waking up (or rather, getting up) in the morning, and/or one about my lights out / screens off time. The latter is more dispositive, really, but I’m not completely sure how to frame a goal in a way that doesn’t penalise me for reading my ereader or turning on a podcast when I genuinely can’t sleep or wake up from nightmares.
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exercise — do some kind of exercise (operationalised as ticking off a task in my loftily-named “Training” Todoist project, whose name used to be a lot more apt in my more athletic days) at a rate of 0.6 per day. This is the goal I’m least happy with. It seems to be encouraging me to go for a lot of 20-minute walks… which is certainly better than doing nothing, but allowing a series of 20-minute walks to buy me quite frequent permission to skip exercising at all is really not what I’m looking for here. I started this goal in April; it’s derailed a few times, but (far worse) I’m not sure it has actually increased the amount of meaningful exercise I’m doing. I want to revamp this, maybe with reference to my Garmin activities somehow? I also think I might like to separate out “go outside and move around at least a bit in the fresh air” and “do ‘proper’ exercise that actually improves your strength and/or conditioning” and beemind them both. Some of my activities tick both these boxes, but there are many that only tick one.
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eatwell — brand new and a bit experimental, so I don’t know how well this is going to work. The idea is: I’ve set up a Todoist project called “Food diary” and I will get datapoints by ticking off tasks in it. There are four daily recurring tasks available: “Morning eating”, which I can tick off if I eat a breakfast that doesn’t include sweet foods and then don’t snack until lunchtime; “Afternoon eating”, which is the same thing for lunch until dinnertime; “Evening eating”, which is the same thing for dinner until bedtime; and “Log food”, which I can tick off if I note down what I’ve eaten for the day. I’ve set the goal to ask me for 3 datapoints per day, with the theoretical aim of doing the logging every day and sticking to all three eating pattern tasks every weekday. If I can keep to that ideal, I’ll gradually earn a bit of buffer. It’s possible that this is too much of a mishmash of tasks, but I quite like the notion of being able to earn a datapoint even on a really bad day just by facing up to how bad it was. I’m not too worried about weaselling around what is and isn’t a “sweet food” or an instance of snacking: I know it when I see it, your honour. I’ll see how this one goes.
I welcome thoughts on my goals!