I need a little extra push to get through editing my dissertation chapters so I thought I’d follow the example of folks who’ve gotten a little more public accountability through Beeminder journals.
I’m not going to make a commitment to update it at any particular interval with whether I’ve derailed, I don’t think, but I’ll update it if I make major changes to the goals, as I complete them, or if I add additional ones.
If you’re also working on a dissertation, academic project, other writing project, or other relevantly similar goals and would like some co-accountability, feel free to link to your thread(s) below!
Here are the goals I’ll start this off with for now.
Dissertation Editing Goals
Toggl’d Hours
Word Count
Restarted at 0 for the “major edits” phase. (This isn’t a “words edited per day” goal but rather a goal that counts only the words I still consider edited. This means its value can drop if, for instance, I find that a section I’d previously considered to be edited contains an error and I mark it as un-edited. For that reason, it’s important that I try to not edge-skate too heavily on this one.)
Specific, Self-imposed Deadlines
To make milestone deadlines that don’t have external requirements more real.
Dissertation (Most) Important Tasks
(Inspired by the must-do-task goal style but with the alteration that I get a +1 for either completing the task or working on it for 45 minutes that day. All of my must-do-tasks goals have this time limit to limit collateral damage done to work-life balance caused by the planning fallacy. If I need a hard deadline, I use a self-imposed deadlines goal like the one above.)
I hope this journal is helpful for you as you race towards this exciting achievement!
As someone who will be writing up a dissertation in… 2? years, I also wanted to give my thanks because it’s so helpful to see how other people structure their academic goals. Academic work can be very nebulous until it very suddenly isn’t, so I think Beeminder can be a perfect way to fight the akrasia, as long as you have a great set of goals!
The Do-More self-imposed deadlines is especially interesting. (I doubt I’m the only Beeminder user who usually finds self-imposed deadlines about as useful as daydreaming. Maybe some external acocuntability could change that!)
I’ve also been working on re-building my morning habit stack now that a few big pieces have shifted in my life, so here’s another set of goals.
It seems like a lot, but they’re all are mini-habits, which means they have crazy low requirements (no more than 1 minute each… with the exception of making a cup of tea). The goal is consistency. And I hope to perform them in the same order, in a single sequence, as often as possible, hoping to get them to stick together as one thing in the habit corners of my brain.
Mini-habits are my favourite for habit-building. Ideally, I want to never miss a day (that’s the whole point of mini-habits) but I don’t want to demand perfection and I want to give my brain a bit of slack to get used to it—but not too much slack—so I’m setting them all to require 80% of what I’d ideally like to be doing. I’m also adding an auto-ratchet that will eliminate any more than 1 day of buffer so that they’re following the “never miss two days in a row” rule.
I can’t wait to see you triumphant over this thing, haha. You’ve worked so hard!
