Hi! My name is Olivia. I have a goal to build up my new freelance writing business to have a solid roster of clients so I can support myself and my freelance journalism endeavors. Living off savings for the past year, I’ve made so many excuses to put off prioritizing this work which has repeatedly led to anguish, stress, low self-confidence and disappointment in myself. Not anymore! I am going to invest in myself and my future by setting my goal of 6 hours of Focusmate sessions per weekday, working on my business which will include deep work writing sessions, self-marketing tasks, and admin/organizational tasks.
Hello! My name is Shannon, and (according to my Screen Time), I’ve spent 5 hours on the Beeminder forums and blog in the past 3 days.
Safe to say, my time management and prioritisation skills are absolutely top notch.
I gave this whole Beeminding thing a chance a few years ago, but that was at a time in my life when the threat of $5 was both too much for me to lose, and not enough of a stick to get me to brush my teeth once a day.
Things are much better now. Before I settled down to spend even more of my evenings on the forums, I was walking up and down my living room to get those pesky Beeminder-tracked steps in.
In all seriousness, I’m both employed now (yay, money that I can afford to lose), and I have enrolled at University this year. I actually have the shell of a routine built, and Beeminder is finally the right fit for my life.
I’ve been a bit naughty in paying to get unlimited goals… but my justification to myself is that I’m already a Hashtag Quantified Self-er, so the only difference now will be the fact the data is getting wired up to my bank account via Beeminder.
I certainly won’t be the first ADHD’er to say “oh yeah, I’m gonna Beemind all the things!!” before disappearing off into the nether… but I’m… hopeful that I keep the good things happening!
Wonderful! Welcome back! I’m amused that your idea of naughtiness is splurging on unlimited goals. We’re actually gradually working on making that unnecessary. At risk of sending you down another rabbit hole: Feature Announcement: Parceling Out Goals Sting-ily | Beeminder Blog
Hey there Kyle here. ADHDer and Product Manager for the local public media station here in Seattle, and an MBA student as well! I first tried Beeminder like…a decade ago?? Like lots of others I have spent lots of time looking for the right solutions to my every wandering brain and difficulty building habits. I was somewhat successful with the platform a few times since I first tried it, but it never stuck for a variety of reasons.
Moving forward to the present(ish) I started Beeminding my first goal in mid-December of last year and for whatever reason was able to stick with it this time. I added one other goal shortly after and am on a 3+ moth streak with both of those. There are a variety of factors that I think have led to me sticking with the platform longer-term this go around - but I’m also scared to question it too much for fear of it all falling apart Though I am not very worried about that at the moment
I now have about 10 goals I keep up with regularly and am constantly tweaking and adjusting what that mix looks like. Overall, this year I have been the most successful with my goals as I have ever been - and Beeminder has played a big part in that! And now that I feel fairly solid in my use of the platform I thought now would be a good time to do an introduction and start posting a bit more frequently. I have been really enjoying reading about all the cool things people have been doing with the platform on the forum
You can get a fairly good idea of what I have been working on lately on my goals page. Outside of work and school I have been learning Piano via Piano Marvel, going through the freeCodeCamp curriculum (into JavaScript now!), working my way through an in depth online cooking course from Rouxbe, and am on track to read 52 books this year from all different genres! I also have a personal website kylepace.net that I’m working on - it’s pretty barebones right now but planning to beemind some regular blog posts on it soon and add some case studies.
Glad to be here and looking forward to connecting with others in the community!
Hi, I’m Vivian, aka Halflight89. Originally I checked beeminder a while ago. But I didn’t have a creditcard back then, and I found it too much of a hassle to manually track my iOS screentime.
However, my AUDHD makes it hard to stick to all the good intentions I have, and after some trial and error with other similar platforms, I decided that I like the graphs and ability to visualize how much more / less I should do in a day better.
I’m still trying to figure out what goals work best for me. So there’s still some goals that won’t last for a week. But my intention is to have max 5 goals for now, that help me take care of my self.
Keepers for now are:
- toothbrushing (I never got to more than once a day until the goal)
- Choir practicing (I got anxious every rehearsal that I didn’t practice enough, and there is a big show coming soon)
- weightloss (My BMI is-no-was over 25 and my sugar intake was far too high)
Still figuring out if it works:
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screentime, I want to spend less time browsing. Currently configured as the sum of browsing on my phone and tablet. Helps me to not go from one device to the next, but if I have spare room on the other device it’s tempting.
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scrolls, I want to slowly un-learn browsing on my phone in general. Currently configured as triangular, but I might replace it with a normal goal, or reduce the screentime goal with the amount of time I used for occasional phone browsing. Or change it to browsing at night.
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beeminder posts - nothing very hard to keep up with, just a small nudge to not completely forget to drop by here if I need advice or have a question.
Considering:
- grocery shopping. I want to visit the store frequently enough to always have a spare meal for the next day. But there’s too many goals for me then, so I’m fine tuning the others first.
My strategy is currently small stakes, small goals by the way. Enough to motivate me to keep going, without pushing myself to overachieve.
Hi! I’m Keegs! I got started with this kind of thing on Stickk, using it to work on math problems 3x/week for year. Currently have an aggressive weight loss goal on there as well that’s working swimmingly. Heard about Beeminder a month or so ago and I’ve been hooked.
I’m a language nerd and currently in the process of converting to Judaism, so I’ve got some Hebrew-related goals, and I’ll probably add more Jewish-themed ones as I go (a little Mishnah every day? “Do something at the synagogue” once a month? Something like that). I’m also a software engineer and serious-book reader. Currently trying to use Boss as a Service to compel me to pretend to be in a Kant seminar.
Smattering of current goals:
- hsentences: Read over “language island” sentences in Hebrew for some minutes per day, testing myself on meaning, adding mnemonic flashcards if I miss them.
- hebac: Practice a small amount of English to Hebrew sentences every day. Same sentences list as above, just in reverse.
- withdraw: I think this is clever. It’s a tax on withdrawing from savings. I tick it up once per day if yesterday I did not transfer money out of savings. If I miss even one day, I derail, so it functions as a gradual tax on savings usage.
- anki: do some anki once a day!
- deepwork: do at least one short deep work session every workday!
- sightwords: practice a stack of sight words with my daughter at least once a week
- worksummary: every couple weeks I have to give a presentation on work I’ve done, and I often forget the details. This goal is to write a brief summary once per work day of what I did that day.
Welcome to the forum! I agree, the withdraw
goal is a neat idea!