Inspired by Narthur’s Journal I have decided to write at least a small thing about all of my goals if there is anything to say. This means the posts will be longer than anticipated but doing this every two weeks should allow for a little bit longer posts.
General
- I’m going to visit my girlfriend and have therefore scheduled a break for all of my goals starting next weekend until the 4th of March.
- being in the red is what gets me going, but only if I can rush to do something about it in the time I have left
Learning Finnish
Current goals:
The goals work, although there are some problems:
- Not enough progress - My slopes for the auto-goals (memrise, clozemaster) are not very steep. I decided to up the ante a little bit, so that I will have to stretch a little bit more to reach my daily goal.
- Not enough time - I have about half an hour on my evening commute back home to finish my vocabulary sessions. So I need to make sure that I don’t overcommit. So the new commitments should be gentle enough.
mondly
No changes. It would be great to make this an auto-goal (maybe through an omnifocus integration), where I check this task off every day anyways?), but I have yet to make time to look into this.
clozemaster
Commitment changed:
- Old: 40 points per day
- New: 56 points per day
This translates to about one additional repetition of an already learned word (16 points). Or 4 completely new or forgotten words (worth 4 points. Or 2 half-mastered words, worth 8 points. Or one new word and one three-quarter-mastered word. Or any other combination of those.
Practically this should get me faster through my “to review” pile and in turn gently lead me to having to learn more new words.
memrise
Commitment changed:
- Old: 1500 points per day
- New: 1700 points per day
The memrise points system is a little bit more involved but I also here went for “the repetition of one already learned word” (200 points) as my additional commitment to the goal.
Keep a Daily Rhythm
Current goals:
The goals work, but I decided to slightly adjust my times as described here.
wakeupontime
Deadline changed:
- Old: 9 am
- New: 8:45 am
leaveontime
Deadline changed:
- Old: 9:50 am
- New: 9:35 am
sleepontime
I had a not-legit derail because I went to sleep and fell asleep before entering data and before the deadline.
Stay in Contact With Family
Current goals:
The goals work. I put into the fine print for all the goals that calling and getting called counts. And calling my brother is now also part of this category.
callbrother
Key data:
- one call per month
- weekends off activated
New goal! I see no reason not to include my brother in my trying to stay in contact.
Reading, Writing, Consuming Media
Current goals:
Goals that work: journal, nachrichten, bmndrjrnl
Goals that need work: blog, lesen
blog
This goal is fine, but there is no day on which I normally publish and I do almost always publish a half-assed journal post. No new commitment yet, because I’m in the middle of rebuilding my website using gatsby, but it’s something on my list for march.
lesen
I will have to move around a lot more pieces of my setup to make this goal worthwhile, but 8 minutes a day is just not enough to make meaningful progress.
I’m experimenting with temptation bundling my podcast consumption and my sports watching, the two things that use up most of my free time during the week, with other things. This should help free some time for reading.
I’m also thinking about limiting the amount of podcasts I listen to to 7 (one per day). The less podcasts I’m subscribed to, the less episodes will end up in my podcatcher and the less time I will spend listening to podcasts. This also would free time to do other stuff like reading. However I’m worried to not discover new podcasts anymore. But maybe that’s a sacrifice I have to accept if reading is actually important to me.
Right now I’m still trying things out, so this will be something for march as well.
General Productivity
Current goals:
Goals that work: asi, eatthefrog, of3dailyreviews
Goals that need work: of3weeklyreviews
All in all these goals do what I want, but I realized that my OmniFocus backlog had become somewhat stale so I used the weekly review to rework how I organize about my projects.
(If you’re just interested in beeminder then you can safely skip the next paragraph.)
There is now a Backlog folder with projects that can be considered active but not committed to yet. Active projects are moved from this folder to my private and job folders and will have to be done before moving on to the backlog projects. I might need to include a work in progress limit. Right now I just try to have the next two to four weeks in mind and judge if the current projects fit into this time frame.
of3weeklyreviews
Since I do daily reviews of my projects I had to define a little better what constitutes a weekly review for me. The one thing I came up with, is a question, inspired by Malcom Ocean’s “Pareto Improvisation” technique he talked about in a recent newsletter[^1]:
Would any part of me not accept this work as a weekly review and can this part convince all the other parts?
If the answer is yes (that is, a part of me doesn’t think this should be counted as a weekly review and it can convince all the other parts of me to agree), then it’s not a weekly review and I have to put in more work.
This is a pretty lenient red line. But it’s a start. I have put this in the fine print of the goal.
P. S.: If I remove the “not” from the question this red line becomes much harder to achieve, I might try this if I need to push myself a little harder.
[^1]: If anybody is interested what inspired me here: It’s the idea of a question or guideline I can answer or adhere to subjectively in context, but that I must answer regardless of opinion or context.
of3morning
Key data:
- one ToDo-List per day
- weekends off activated
New goal! Create a ToDo-List for every workday in OmniFocus. This list should at least include three items, but it’s unimportant how it is implemented.
This hopefully helps to step up OmniFocus usage in general. No output is tracked yet and the implementation is left pretty open, since I don’t know yet how I want to handle this.
Weight Related
Current goals:
Nothing new here goals-wise. But I might need to track my calorie intake. That’s something to consider for next time.
I also might need to invest in a more accurate scale. My current scale is only accurate within half a kilo, which makes it hard to see progress and weight differences in general.