Max's beeminder journal

Anki

I have made my anki learning goal slightly harder (must complete all reviews 6 times a week, rather than 5 times) and retro-ratcheted to get rid of the buffer.

In the past, I usually burn out with Anki if I miss a day or two of reviews and end up with a huge backlog, so reducing my beeminder buffer and making sure I study each day should help avoid that.

Work

I have archived my work goal (not because I have retired, sadly) since my current way of tracking “focused time working on important tasks” is starting to grate on me. The small amount of friction when changing task is enough that I have begun avoiding it, not tracking the time carefully, making the goal less useful.

I have been playing around with tagtime (would be great for this, and avoid me having to stop and start timers, etc.) but have never been able to make the tagtime habit stick in the past, so am not certain if this would be the best way to go.

Work productivity has been very good recently, so I’ll probably wait for a few weeks before making a choice, and see if I feel the goal is still useful.

Tracking nebulous tasks

I enjoyed Dreev’s blog post about tracking nebulous tasks: How to beemind nebulous projects like doing your taxes or fixing a neurosis

I have been finding this journal useful, and generally find that writing clarifies my thoughts about a problem and makes me more creative in solving it, so I was very excited to try this idea.

I make a lot of notes in Evernote, so tried to track the wordcount of a project log in evernote using beeminder.

Unfortunately:

Regardless of the true number of words, the word count URL Minder picks up is 1042 words.

Looking at the page source, it loads an empty page and then requests the actual content via ajax (because it is 2018 and this seems like a good idea to people). I presume 1042 words is the count of this empty page?

I tried using the content URL itself, but unfortunately it requires a particular referrer to be set.

Bethany kindly confirmed that URLminder is essentially curling the URL and counting the words, so would only be counting the Evernote container page, before the content is loaded. Annoying that Evernote would not make it easy to fetch the content of a pubicly shared note.

I’ve got code lying around to do a combined wordcount of all evernote articles in a particular tag, used for tracking the progress of my book goal, so will throw something together to track project journals as as well.

Next update in a week!

2 Likes