A bit of an wishy-washy update today. Full of empty promises and failed goals…
Reading goals
I finished my short-term goal to finish a book I was getting a bit stuck on (https://www.beeminder.com/penten/book). I greatly enjoyed ticking it off and archiving it. I like the idea of having a few short term goals running to help me finish small projects, allowing me to try things out, learn more about what type of goals work for me, and keep a sense of novelty about what goals I am working on each day.
Since I have just started a new Chinese book I decided to stop my previous Chinese reading mini-habit goal (read an article or page of a book in Chinese each day), replacing it with a new goal to finish this book.
I need to read 5 pages a day, which will have me finishing in a couple of months, which should be sustainable. My Chinese reading speed is still recovering after a couple of years of neglect, so I didn’t want to set too high a goal.
I also want to restart my Anki habit soon, so to consider a page ‘read’ I must also have noted down any interesting sentences I want to review on those pages.
The goal has been running for a few days and is going well, it helps that it is a good book.
‘Stuff’ goal
I let the stuff goal die： https://www.beeminder.com/penten/stuff
I was beggining to dread it each day, I think it was useful while it ran, but to make real progress tidying up and reducing the number our possesions I really think I need to schedule a few more big, focused clean-up sessions, like I had done with clothes. I have added something to my backlog to schedule some more in.
(Another thing I would like to do soon is set up a goal to whittle down my backlog. Unfortunately the task to do this is also on the backlog…)
Book / editing goal
This is still barely moving, and I have not done anything about it yet. I will, I really need to get the damn thing finished. Half-finishing things is something I often seem to have problems with, so I will focus on this soon.
Treating yellow as red
To try and avoid panics like last night when I had to rush to get ‘something, anything’ posted to avoid derailing my journal goal, I am again thinking of ways to avoid beemergencies.
I know some people have meta goals to keep every goal in the green. I don’t want to go this far yet, but I am going to try experimenting with a mindset shift of considering yellow to be an emergency, making red ‘a really really big emergency’. I doubt this will work, but I might as well try the easiest possible intervention before creating a meta goal to do it!