nocomputer: I mark this as +1 if I woke up with no computer in my room. I have a newish habit of keeping my non-work computer completely disconnected and packed away in the closet most days. If I need it, I get it, but this goal prevents me from getting used to it being there. So far so good. My smartphone usage is already tightly controlled with a Brick, so I’m closing in on having a highly disconnected non-work life, which is great.
alcohol: My first do-less goal. Got in the habit recently of having a beer most evenings. It’s fine. But I don’t want it to grow, so I’m setting a 1.5/day limit. Probably will taper this down to 1/day to encourage a nicer cycle of sobriety & celebration.
Stuff that cost me money:
withdraw: I got paid and decided I wanted to buy a whole bunch of stuff, so I bit the bullet and spent some savings. Savings tax now at $10!
alcohol: I just didn’t set it up right at first. Figured it out. Happy to pay the small fee. Alcohol tax now at $10!
Other thoughts:
I have 14 goals! Most of them manual. Feels like a fine amount. I like that if I do all my goals I am on top of my life: it means I’ve done some solid work while at work, I’ve studied all the things I love to study, my kids are learning stuff, and I am getting stronger! I should probably add something good-husband-y.
My anki goal was feeling boring so I started memorizing all the countries in the world and now it’s fun again.
Retired the alcohol one almost immediately. It was a holiday week and it became very clear that the limit in no way supported my preferences/needs/etc.
Pumped up my Hebrew studies a bit for the second time. I will have to stop squeezing it in just before bed, but it’s really motivating to see the cumulative hours tick up. Each one of those hours also corresponds to many, many hours of listening time on runs, too, so I feel accomplished.
My educate-my-kids goals are functioning as intended. I keep getting surprised and being like “we haven’t studied sight words in HOW long???”. Perfect.
Continuing to enjoy not having a computer in my room. I also moved my Brick into the basement, so I have to bother a possibly-sleeping housemate to activate any entertainment functions on my phone. My phone time is basically zero since that switch.
Hi, just wondering.. I notice that you’re using a Brick. How hard is it to bypass? I’ve used almost literally every app I knew to control my screen time, but one way or the other, it’s too easy for me to sabotage.
I love the computer goal btw, I have a similar goal for my iPad (it’s always downstairs unless I have a very good reason for it - but before I sleep it goes back downstairs again).
Hi! The bypass is too easy for someone who is highly motivated to bypass. Some people report being able to uninstall the app and have that bypass it, and there’s a built-in emergency bypass that you can only do a limited number of times, after which you have to literally call them and ask for more bypasses, I think.
The phone call part is my hard boundary – I despise phone calls, and I have an arbitrary self-respect barrier around not uninstalling the app, so that part isn’t a problem for me.
If I didn’t have those boundaries, I’d need a more serious mechanism, like a long-term high-stakes bet with a serious friend or something, but I’m sure you’ve considered stuff like that already.
Definitely worth trying, though! I love my Brick! One major improvement to their app has been the ability to auto-brick at certain times, so whenever I wake up, I’m already bricked. That has been the difference between an hour of screen time and zero screen time most days, for me.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer. It’s very helpful. I considered a serious bet indeed, but that doesn’t work either. Brick would work for me if there is no sabotaging possible after activating brick mode - except for the emergency bypass. If it’s just sitting there on non-bricked times I won’t uninstall.
Thanks! The instructions inspired me to create a different shortcut that works with an other app I already own. Not the same - but the shipping costs are huge for the Netherlands. If this doesn’t work as I want, I’ll try a brick or something similar.
Retiring my savings goal: it’s just not inducing me to save.
Finished my first book-specific goal. A little confused about whether it’s respecting the page count or not: I’d expect it to just be like “woohoo, you finished!” but nope. I’m guessing I’m not clicking something.
I really liked the experience of ticking up the page goal and getting the graph. I still use goodreads for the social aspect but these graphs are prettier/more motivating.
My pushups and Hebrew-study goals have ramped up a bit and I’m having to change daytime behaviors to accomplish them. In particular, saving the Hebrew until bedtime means that I’m not able to really bring my full attention to the task in a way that I like, so I’m finding bits of time earlier in the day to take a chunk out of it.
One thing I’m getting a lot of value out of is my goal of summarizing the work I do every day. It’s something I did haphazardly before beeminder but now I’ve got an excellent daily habit. It’s a really small thing, just a few minutes, but it’s useful both for seeing where my time is going and being able to report on it at daily/weekly meetings.
Yes, it recognizes that you have achieved the intended page count! You can see that from the fact that the infinity sign has appeared instead of “due in … days” on the graph.
Having my first big set of failures. Missed stuff two days in a row. I think it’s a combo of the initial rush of enthusiasm fading + a weekend where I’m busy with other fun things: Friends staying over. Watching a movie with my wife instead of studying Hebrew. It seemed worth a $10-15 daily charge. Also it’s hard to stay committed to evening goals when you’re three PBRs deep lol.
I’m going to combine my two Hebrew goals into one for simplicity: it’s demoralizing to finish a chunk of Hebrew-English work at 10:30 and then to have another 10 minutes of English-Hebrew to do before I’m “allowed” to sleep.
I think everything else is staying put. I failed on pushups but I’ve been really appreciating the pushup goal, so I’m not changing it. Since I’m losing weight I’m not gaining much strength but I think it’s helping me maintain a modicum of athletic appearance. Like everything else I just gotta start finding time during the day for it.
My kids are now onboard with my beeminder goals for their studies (sight words for the little one, Hebrew lesson for the big one) – they like the idea of helping me not lose money, so it helps rationalize my totally random-moment attempts at throwing flashcards at them.
Cancelled my Boss as a Service subscription, which was ostensibly helping me make progress on a (pretend) Kant seminar every week, but mostly didn’t work for me. Switched it to a twice-a-week “touch” goal here on beeminder. Also my coworkers know I’m reading Kant, and I’m motivated not to look like an intellectual dilettante, so that will hopefully help with reestablishing the Kant habit. Also once a week is really just not enough time to make any progress on the Critique of Pure Reason.
My Stickk weight loss contract is about to end today, I think. 12 pounds in 12 weeks! Planning to change nothing about the effective habits that made that work (one meal a day, fasted distance runs) but to experiment with how to track it on here instead of Stickk.
Kinda excited. My approach with Stickk was to weigh in as rarely as possible to make it more likely that I’d see big jumps down. But this also means there’s occasional surprise jumps up that are extra-demotivating. Just recording every day and watching a trendline seems better now that I’m slowing down the pace anyway.
Hebrew study with older kid: Just forgot to ask them before they went to sleep. Monetary pain will hopefully make me leave better notes for myself.
Sight words with little kid: Same as above
Archiving:
deepwork - was finding it annoying to track. My work varies a lot: sometimes I have weeks where I need to be interruptable constantly and some weeks I can carve out lots of time for deep work. I do this naturally anyway and don’t need to track it
snow queen book - hated the book and archived it lol
logic for programmers book - I suck at taking breaks at work and that’s the only time I’d be able to work on this. Still reading it just more haphazardly.
Hebrew sentences - I’m reorganizing my Hebrew studies now that my achilles tendon is injured and I can’t just run/listen my way to fluency. I added a “touch hebrew once a day” goal instead.
Etc:
The daily weigh-in goal is going really well so far, mostly because it’s been a freefall downward, so that’s motivating. I think all that happened is that my “birthday week” ended so people stopped feeding me cakes and wine and cocktails in the evening lol, so OMAD started doing the trick again. At 148, which is really close, I’ll be as svelte as I was as a hardy thirty year old living on a farm over a decade ago. Aiming for “unreasonably cut dad” but I’ve never been unreasonably cut, so we’ll have to see where it goes lol.
The twice a week “read some Kant” goal is going well. Had a really good session last night before bed, unexpectedly. Thought I might retire it but I feel the wheels turning again.
Also, pushups! I’ve been surprised how motivating beeminder has been about my meager pushup goal. I think it works because it’s so immediately-actionable: even if it’s 11pm I can spring out of bed and knock them out. I’ve been very cautiously bumping it up. Finding myself even…enjoying the pushups? Very weird.
It’s been a week! Feel like I just posted in here.
Derailed:
daily_weighin - It just got late at night and I felt like five bucks was a lower cost than banging around in the upstairs bathroom and maybe waking people up
etc:
touch-hebrew - the daily touch goal for Hebrew is going OK; certainly way better than zero, though some days it’s pretty close to zero. Still lamenting my foot injury preventing me from running and doing real language learning.
first-critique - the every-few-days Kant touch-goal is also going well. Still waiting for a sizeable burst of inspiration on these touch goals, but I’m enjoying the minor but worthwhile progress without that, too.
pushups - officially bumped another ten as of yesterday. At 40 a day, I split them into daytime/nighttime and that made it no more burdensome than before. Will probably start escalating faster on these once I’m habituated to the new daytime set.
Not really beeminder-related, but as part of my general avoidance of addictive computing, I’ve been fantasizing about putting together a typewritten zine/newsletter containing little snippets of all the little projects I’m working on, of which there are many:
Programming in Forth on a Commodore 64
Reading novels/watching movies/listening to records that might be commonplace in 1982
Studying Kant
Converting to Judaism
I need to save up one more paycheck to be able to afford a typewriter in decent shape, I think.
I’ve got nocomputer set to archive since I’ve now moved my internet-attached computer out of my bedroom altogether. It’s now a “family computer” in the living room like it’s the 90s again.
Totally derailed right after my last post! Pushups, my Hebrew daily touch goal, and my daughter’s sight words review. I think all that happened is that I was awake late, and by the time I realized I had to spring into action and do pushups + Hebrew, it was past midnight. Kids are starting school today so I think this will self-correct (I can’t stay up to midnight if I have to wake them up at 7).
I was dreading my first-critique Kant study yesterday, but ended up really enjoying it. I think a lot of the dread is time-based: like, a dread of making totally trivial progress just before bed. So I did it in the late afternoon instead, and made genuine progress!
I’ve been working on my cursive this past week (got some Spencerian workbooks). Unsure if I want to make this a weekday touch goal. Maybe! It’s sounding good now that I’m typing it out. I like watching the graph go up.
Been adding a lot of nautical terms to my daily anki as part of a sudden enthusiasm for Patrick O’Brian, and that’s fun. Ties in well with the geography cards I’m already working through.
Now I do 50 pushups a day! I derailed on this and that! My handwriting is amazing now! lol.
I slowed my beeminder-journal-updating goal down to once every month and it’s much harder to come up with a story about what happened since the last post, but: things are going awesome!
My weight has officially stopped going down. I blame my achilles tendon injury taking forever to heal. I adjusted the weight goal to be in maintenance mode until I’m able to run again.
My Kant study has stalled. Maybe I need to let him go. But what if I never read Kant??? Ugh.
