Martin's Beeminder "Tagebuch" (journal)

Oooooh Flowstate looks dangerously good. Like I am getting similar vibes as when I first discovered Beeminder. I got to try that!

Addendum: There is a similar tool for git repositories:

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General

  • I’m going on vacation today! Therefore all my goals are paused until the 11th.
  • “Ultimately I think the way forward is going to be to perhaps find the goals where cheating is more effort than not cheating. I have no idea how to cheat a weighing scales on a daily basis. Likewise I’d have no idea how to cheat a step-counter. If I only ever use Beeminder to lean into the goals that I don’t know how to cheat on, that’s still a good way of doing it.” How well put! Not knowing can be a huge plus.
  • Taking part in the first alpha of TaskRatchet has been a lot of fun. Seeing and being able to use a thing like this - even for a short amount of time - has really shown me how much I would LOVE to have a One-Off-Commitment-Contract-Tool like TaskRatchet.
  • I had to keep my reflections rather short this time, since I still need to pack before leaving.

Learning Finnish

Current goals:

No changes.

Keep a Daily Rhythm

Current goals:

One slack day per week on all of these works. I’m less stressed and still have to do the thing every day.

wakeupontime actually derailed non-legitely, because my wifi didn’t work (or rather the wifi did work, but not my cable modem).

Stay in Contact With Family

Current goals:

No changes.

Reading, Writing, Consuming Media

Current goals:

My new blogging process consists of three goals now. I have to come up with a topic for a post before writing a draft of a post and finally publishing it. Hopefully this’ll help me raise the quality of writing over there.

General Productivity

Current goals:

No changes.

Sports, Weight Related

Current goals:

The Yoga course is going well, but I have stopped losing weight, I think. Not sure yet what to do about it, but maybe I’ll come up with something when I’m on vacation.

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@phi @matti

How does this Flowstate thing work? I don’t understand - everything gets deleted if you ever stop writing? Do you lose it forever? Seems like you’d need a keystroke logger with it…

@matti @dreev

I’m hooked on fivethirtyeight.

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Great :wink:

You choose a timespan for your session (and a font), e.g. 10 minutes, and Flowstate WILL MAKE YOU WRITE: If you stop for more than 5s you lose what you wrote in that session.
Once you made it through those 10 minutes the text is yours to keep. Forever. The app changes colours and you can then edit the draft you just fabricobbled to your heart’s content.

It goes without saying that this is also a prime example for a commitment device.

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General

  • Vacations and all the breaks associated with it are really important. I cannot overstate how helpful it is to step away from Beeminder for a week or two and come back to it with fresh eyes. Take breaks everybody!
  • I stumbled up on a very helpful course “Learning how to learn”.
  • I have removed all my recurring goals in Taskwarrior. The app is just not great in handling recurrence, yet.
  • Work Cycles sounds like an interesting idea.

Learning Finnish

Current goals:

The new Anki goal is not a autodata goal (for now). I simply log a point if I use it every weekday.

I started to use anki when I was doing the aforementioned online course about learning and I have found it to be a much more intense learning experience than both clozemaster and memrise have been. I still try to find out what is a good amount of new cards for me each day before making this an autodata goal. Also I have two decks in anki which are not about learning Finnish, but about web development and learning, these might have to be tracked independently, but let’s see first if that’s necessary.

Keep a Daily Rhythm

Current goals:

No changes. But I’m thinking about adding a quitontime goal to give me enough time each day to decompress.

Stay in Contact With Family

Current goals:

No changes.

Reading, Writing, Consuming Media

Current goals:

blogdraft has been changed to be an input based goal. I’m very happy with the draft for my next post, but it’s not finished yet and I don’t want to rush it. I have decided to invest two hours a week to work on my draft. It is ready when it’s ready. This might mean that my blog and/or blogtopic goal needs adjustment, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

I have retroratched lesspods. I’m addicted to listening to podcasts. And I’m cheating myself to listen to more podcasts than my rational mind would want to (by having a too lenient weekend allowance). I want to listen to one episode a day and maybe one before going to sleep, while laying in bed. So committing to two a day is fine. But I have also dialed down my allowance on the weekend to 3 (was 7) for the weekends-off feature.

General Productivity

Current goals:

No changes.

Sports, Weight Related

Current goals:

No changes.

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General

  • After removing the Urgency integration of Taskwarrior and last week also removing all my scheduled goals AND having problems of entering a lot of tasks with proper metadata quickly and correctly into Taskwarrior AND being frustrated how hard weekly reviews had become since I started using Taskwarrior AND incidentally reading about deep work on the doist Blog I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t justify the amount of work I had to put into Taskwarrior to just keep it up to date anymore. I felt I needed to change this asap. I also felt that I couldn’t go back to OmniFocus directly, because I would just face the same frustrations as before I made the change to Taskwarrior (namely: no good way to integrate with Beeminder, slooowww improvement curve of the software itself and therefore added frustration about the uncertainty how long it would take for Omni to have an api, webhokks, ifttt-Integration, etc.). The same goes with all the other task management apps and services, I’ve tried. Every one of them had something else I found frustrating or not ideal. I wanted to try something new (to me). And since I found myself already on the page of doist. I almost on a whim signed up for a year of todoist premium (it was just 30$ and therefore easily justifiable). This again means a lot of changes to my productivity system. But the first few days have already been much better.
  • I will also just generally note here, that I have created 11 ifttt triggers (yoga, weighin, weeklyreviews, news, journal, callmom, callgrandparents, calldad, callbrother, bmndrjrnl, anki) and 2 direct label integrations (asi, eatthefrog) to beemind from todoist directly.
  • Work Cycles has been a fantastic addition to my productivity toolkit! I’ve used it about 10 times already since last week and I love the structured approach to work.
  • Focusmate on the other hand doesn’t work for me. I just found it too stressful.
  • I have tagged all goals in Beeminder with a camelCased version of the heading under which they appear in this journal. This should help keep me organized when I add new goals. If they don’t yet have a tag, I probably haven’t added them to the Tagebuch either! (More about beeminder’s hidden tagging feature)
  • I have started to plan out my whole day in my calendar. This has been especially helpful in the evening, when a little bit tired, because I already made the decision of what happens next. I replan the schedule if needed, but I rarely have to delete appointments with myself to the a specific task. It helped to realize how much time I actually do have at my disposal and led to creating a quitontime goal (see below).

Learning

Current goals:

I have renamed the section to learning, since it now includes not only goals pertaining to my goal to learn Finish, but also to my goal to become a better developer.

New goal: Freecodecamp makes me do freecodecamp lessons for two hours each week. I reset my progress there last week, because I did FCC such a long time ago, that I missed out on a lot of lessons and also felt like I needed a refresher on some of the basics. Weekends are off as per usual. I use the timer feature of the iOS-App to track my time spent with FCC.

I doubled my commitment to clozemaster (112 -> 224 points per day). I slightly raised my commitment to memrise to (2000 -> 2200 points per day). The memrise iOS-App seemingly stopped working for the community courses I use (as was announced a while ago), so I have started using the decks website on my phone, which actually works quite well and even has some advantages over the app:

  • I can use the difficult words feature
  • I can review all my words in all of my courses at once

It has two annoyances, though:

  • When writing my word, into the text field, iOS automatically capitalizes the first letter, which means I have to remember to tap the shift button once before writing my word
  • Autocomplete remembers what I have written and makes it sometimes easier than it should be

Still, I’m mostly happy so far, actually.

The new Anki goal works and consists of three decks right now:

  • [W/ audio] Finnish - English Core 900 (Spoken Language)
  • a FreeCodeCamp deck
  • a self made deck to the online Course “Learning How To Learn”

I don’t see the need right now to track progress anymore closely than “doing all the cards every day”. I have it set to show at most three new cards every day per set.

Keep a Daily Rhythm

Current goals:

I have added a quitontime goal which should help me to leave not latter than 8 hours and 30 minutes after I came into work. The way I have set it up is this: I enter a 0 datapoint with a comment of my planned quitting time (giving me a chance to stay longer if work makes it absolutely necessary). When I leave I update that datapoint to a 1 if I left on or before the set time.

Stay in Contact With Family

Current goals:

No changes.

Reading, Writing, Consuming Media

Current goals:

blogdraft as an input based goal has been great! I have made it so that it automatically trims safety buffer after 7 days.

After admitting last week to being addicted to podcasts, I actually stopped listening to them as much and got a lot more done. I also started to take some vitamins, so I’m not sure exactly if it is listening to podcasts as much, but I listen to about one a day now and have therefore lowered my allowed podcast episodes per day to 1.5 for now.

General Productivity

Current goals:

No changes.

Sports, Weight Related

Current goals:

No changes.

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General

My Top 3 for Work and Life

I used this last weekend to reassess my priorities for this year/my current situation and focussed heavily on my top 3 goals in my working context and my life context. This has helped hugely to calibrate what I really need to do right now and what I need to do less of.

Commitments- and Time-Budget

"Considering we all have 24h a day, we have to budget for the commitment debt we sign up for. That way we don’t have to prepare 5 talks in a week, but can hold 5 talks. We can do cool things and realistically gauge if this fits into our life, as every commitment debt is budgeted for. No (ok let’s be honest, less) crunch nights and no flaking out. It’s a debt we owe and there will be collection.

That’s the idea of commitment debt and using Beeminder to get out of commitment debt and not biting off more than we can chew."(@mufflon)

After reading about budgeting time and commitments I have put together a spreadsheet with all my commitments:

Basically I have written down every commitment (the screenshot only shows part of Beeminder’s commitments) in minutes, throughout each day (Monday to Sunday). If there are commitments that don’t have a specific day on which they should happen their durations are added to the weekly column. I then calculate how much time I use for these commitments each day and each week and see how much time I have actually budgeted already.

I can see if I overcommit in this way pretty quickly, how I use my time and if I have enough unplanned for time (I aim for about two days (minus 8 hours of sleep per day) of completely free time each week).

Monthly planning with Ultraworking Comming Up

I have committed to take part in a free online training event from Ultraworking, which will happen on Saturday. I’m curious what awaits me here, but this sounds interesting:

It’s free and will be hyper-practical: it’ll be only about 30% theory; 70% of it will be guided review time to go deep into how your past month went, how you want your next month to go, and installing the relevant tools and processes to ensure you have a great month.(Ultraworking)

Learning

Current goals:

Two new goals: up2date is like a second reading goal and tries to make me keep up with current trends around web developments (commitment: 20 minutes each workday).

Code2code is a goal meant to make me try new things out, programming wise. Maybe it’s a new library, a new (to me) concept or pattern. Maybe it’s a kata or two. The idea is to just code for coding’s sake, hence the name.

Keep a Daily Rhythm

Current goals:

I have upped my commitment to quitontime (3 per week to 4 per week). I also have changed how I enter data: Instead entering a 0 with a comment each morning telling me when I have to quit working for today at the latest. Instead I do the same but with a 1. I’d remove the point if I don’t make it.

Stay in Contact With Family

Current goals:

No changes.

Reading, Writing, Consuming Media

Current goals:

I decided to archive blog since blogdraft (an input based goal) is a much nicer metric for me. I have read some of the replies to the recent topic about these type of goals, going purely input base here makes sense for me, since developing my blog is not in my top 3 priorities right now.

General Productivity

Current goals:

No changes.

Sports, Weight Related

Current goals:

No changes.

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How’s todoist working for you? How does the ifttt integration work?

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It has worked out okay so far. Todoist is deceptively simple. my first reaction when I don’t know how to do something or can’t find a feature is “OmniFocus would handle this better!” and in most cases that’s actually true, but Todoist can be made to work. The interface is lacking some things like hiding things that I don’t need to see right now (not due today for example), labels cannot be of arbitrary length (which means I have to abbreviate my project tree system’s URI’s), transforming many tasks at once is not as easy and no taxonomic dimension is unlimitedly branchable, which sucks. In short: I’d much rather use OmniFocus, but Todoist is still surprisingly useable and has an integration to Beeminder for recurring tasks (through ifttt) and one-off tasks directly, which is why I’m fine with using Todoist. On top of that I get reminded constantly that I simply don’t know the todoist way to do things, yet. Not enough keyboard shortcuts? There is an extension for that! Could I see myself switching to OmniFocus right now if they (or rather: Beeminder) would offer a working integration for recurring as well as one-off tasks? Absolutely! Could I see myself staying with Todoist after this year? Yes. So in short the friction has not been big enough to regret the switch, but having seen a good amount of Task Management Apps and knowing OmniFocus well, I surely miss some of the power user features I have grown accustomed to.

To answer the second question: I have created a bunch of labels in todoist with the prefix bmndr, e.g. bmndr_yoga. I also have a weekly recurring task in todoist with the same label and I also have an ifttt trigger that adds a datapoint to my yoga goal when a task labeled bmndr_yoga gets completed. It was super simple to set up and it just works. Exactly what I need in my life, since I’m already spending so much time on productivity and related things.

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I would miss the sense of satisfaction I get from checking off the task in Beeminder, though.

That’s exactly how I use it for recurring tasks. Love the bmdr_ prefix to avoid label clutter!

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General

(Sorry for those very long posts recently! This journal is my only outlet for productivity nerdery right now…)

Monthly planning with Ultraworking

The Ultraworking event last Saturday was a success! Doing a monthly review and planning ahead has been very helpful.

So what is it that I have been learning there? The event was basically a time boxed and managed planning process that looks back on what has happened in the last month, while collecting ideas on what to do in July, prioritizing those ideas and making sure that they get done.

  • Step 1: Debrief - You try to look back on the past month and look at every day, if it has been a good or bad day and what things happened.
  • Step 2: Evaluate -
    • Step 2a: You write down your biggest problems, opportunities, major commitments and skills do develop.
    • Step 2b: You also look at all the “impact areas” (areas, that impact your life) like health, profession, finance, etc.
  • Step 3: Prioritize - The collected ideas are evaluated by criticality, certainty (how certain it is to get an intended outcome), cost (How much attention has be spent to this) and you pick your “shortlist” of things to operationalize
  • Step 4: Operationalize - Here two things happen
    • 4a: You set a monthly theme (mine is “Establish base camp”) and write a short policy statement (mine is “I try to lay the groundwork to have my adventure and have the actual knowledge to make it to the top.”)
    • 4b: You decide what you have to do about an idea that made it onto your shortlist. The following is an example for step 4b:

So as you can see it’s a pretty involved process. If lead by a moderator and through hard time boxing it’s possible to do it in 90 minutes, but not without the need to go back and do some rewrites, reprioritization, etc. I probably spent 3 hours, all told.

But all in all I have learned a lot!

Monthly attention budget

One outcome of the monthly planning which took part on Saturday was a reassessment of my available free time in a whole month on Sunday. This basically was the result of trying to map my “commitments and time budget” from last week onto the cost metric in step 3 of the monthly planning spreadsheet. Here is a screenshot of what I mean:

Two things I want to point out: Firstly you can assign a percentage to your idea, which measures the attention you would need to spend in this. Secondly there is a total amount of attention (for me it is 82%) for July.

I have learned the technical term for using an optimal amount of the available productive capacity is capacity utilization. One should optimize this in such a way that there is enough room to be able to deal with anything unexpected, new ideas, etc. Two numbers were thrown around as well: Around 66% is a good amount of productive capacity to utilize and about 80% is “olympic level” meaning that going above this tends to produce more problems than it’s worth. Now, I assume that Beeminder folk - even among productive people - probably rank higher on the scale of how much productivity resource they they tend do commit in advance, but it’s probably still a good thing to keep in mind that planning away 100% of your free time is a bad idea.

This was a key take away from the monthly planning: Time is finite, so you better focus on your highest priorities.

I came up with another spreadsheet (my “monthly attention budget”) that calculates based on the data from my other spreadsheet (the aforementioned “commitments and time budget”)…

  • how much time I truly have every month, with work, sleep, beeminder commitments, eating, etc. taken out of it: about 100 hours a month
  • how much the different percentages of the total are and what those are in hours, minutes, work cycle sessions (à 3 hours), pomos (25 minutes work + 5 minutes break), days and weekends

It looks like this:

So when trying to allocate how much attention I want to spend on an idea like my blog I can look at the 5% row and see I can work on my blog goal almost two work cycles on top of any beeminder commitments.

Reassessing my top priorities and my beeminder commitments

After the not-so-mild shock of a how little time in a month I have to get things done, I needed to reasses my priorities. What a healthy thing to do!

Instead of 6 so-called top projects, only 2 remain. These can now get my attention finally.

I have also dialed back on a bunch of beeminder goals, as you will see. The reason for this is that I could, of course, choose to spend my time on a kinda broad array of life areas, but I would rather try to focus on my actual priorities and get things done in those. So beeminder needs to be recalibrated in this way, too.

Figured out how to look at my 9 to 5 job

Another thing that has just clicked thanks to the monthly planning session somehow: My “joby job” needs to be treated differently than my free time. It doesn’t need to be part of my personal productivity system as much and can be seen almost as an outside influence. When I go to work we organize it on a kanban board, have dailies and retros and all that stuff. There are people to be taken into account and meetings to be coordinated, there are tickets to be worked on and there is software to be released. All of these things happen in their own universe of which I am a part of, but my other projects outside of work are not.

This means: When doing review tasks like weekly reviews and monthly planning sessions these things don’t need to be reviewed in the same way. They also don’t need to fit holistically in the same way as my personal projects need to. If I would be a freelancer or entrepreneur that would be a different story, since my available attention would have to be used to make money. But right now the deal is: Less available attention in exchange for a steady income. But also less to account for when doing “meta work”.

Other stuff

  • I have created Siri shortcuts for my showers, sleepontime, wakupontime and leaveontime goals. It has been super easy (thanks @dehowell) and I don’t know why I waited so long to do it!
  • todoist actually has a way to schedule a recurring task based on compleation instead of the original date: every!
  • About reviews in GTD: “Getting Things Done addresses the issue by basically saying, “Yeah, it takes effort. Buckle down and do your weekly reviews and you’ll be fine.” I’ve done that in the past, but I don’t really feel like making my todo system as central a part of my life right now as GTD requires.” (@narthur)

Learning

Current goals:

Keeping up2date would happen at work and doesn’t need to be accounted for. I either have time to do it at work, or not.

Since I removed 4 “priority” goals my blog became important again as a playground for coding and writing in my free time. Therefore, the commitment to code in my free time should be connected to this higher prioritized goal. So instead of coding for coding’s sake, I try to work on my blog. I also lowered the amount of time I commit to do so (2 hours per week -> 1 hour per week).

Keep a Daily Rhythm

Current goals:

leaveontime’s deadline moved (from 08:50 am to 08:25 am), since that was what I was already aiming for in my head. Leave on time non legitly derailed because I have accidentally deleted a data point.

Stay in Contact With Family

Current goals:

No changes.

Reading, Writing, Consuming Media

Current goals:

I changed my commmitment to read (2 hours per week -> 1 hour per week) and blog topic (1 per week -> 2 per month). I want to focus on my monthly projects more instead of just reading and since I don’t publish a blog post every week anymore, I lessened the amount of topics to come up with.

General Productivity

Current goals:

Since the monthly planning has been such a success, I will commit to doing it every month.

Sports, Weight Related

Current goals:

I derailed on my my fitness pal goal (mfp). I procrastinated to enter data, as simple and dumb as that.

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Can you explain that last line for me? How do you know how much the beeminder commitments are from that chart?

And I don’t understand the Pomos column - it looks 4 times too small. Did you divide the Hours column by 2 instead of multiplying by 2?

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So you lessened the lesen :stuck_out_tongue:

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It’s not in the screenshot but I have a list where I calculated what it means for a “standard month“ (I think it’s four full weeks and two days) to read an hour for a week. Or to having to drive to work every workday (and back) for half an hour.

The Pomodoro thing is an error in my calculation! Thanks for pointing that out! Thank goodness it will only really become relevant next month. :sweat_smile:

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And it could be SO much easier and more powerful IF the iOS app just… ok I’ll shut up already.

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General

  • I managed to accidentally spill a WHOLE glass of water on my Macbook last week and I’m amazed that I can still type out this post on the same machine - I entered some emergency fake data so as to not derail because those were circumstances that I could not anticipate…
  • I consolidated my commitments and my monthly attention budget spreadsheets into one, which will help me to keep them synced. Single source of truth, etc.
  • A, to me, fascinating viewpoint that @zedmango expresses in two recent threads (number 1, number 2): A kind of “context aware beeminding”. That is, they would like to commit to things in such a way that they have eep! days when they wish (e. g.: every day), but they want to actually commit to doing the thing, when in the appropriate context nothing more important or urgent comes up. So it’s a little like a second order commitment: the commitment they want to “track” is a commitment of commitments that dynamically, depending on the context, changes what it actually is they want to commit to - but they do want to commit to this dynamic commitment no matter what.
  • I feel VERY good about my current high level productivity situation. Everything is reviewed, thought about and put into a working system. Still miss Omnifocus, but Todoist works. The next challenge for me is to spend my two work cycle sessions on the weekend not only on meta work… :wink:

Learning

Current goals:

blogcode derailed, because I didn’t plan ahead far enough and ran out of time.

Keep a Daily Rhythm

Current goals:

No changes.

Stay in Contact With Family

Current goals:

No changes.

Reading, Writing, Consuming Media

Current goals:

blogdraft is my catchall goal to make me write. I have had no real need for the blogtopic, since I don’t publish posts on a regular schedule right now.

General Productivity

Current goals:

No changes.

Sports, Weight Related

Current goals:

No changes.

2 Likes

Nice! I mean not nice, but nice that it still works! Glad the keyboard isn’t soldered onto the mainboard yet :wink:

Don’t! Or do, idc. But I would let it derail and then email support and tell them the sad story of my life Macbook. This is clearly an unusual event that to avoid was not on your mind when you signed up for Beeminder. Right? I mean assuming that you don’t do this all the time. :man_shrugging:

I hear ya :roll_eyes:

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Ahhh! Totally just let the goal derail and respond to the legit check email the next morning!

Good luck on the Macbook, though!

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