Update 2019-11-20
Tasker
Today I made a couple upgrades to my Tasker profiles. I modified my gym profile to wait for an hour and fifteen minutes before posting a datapoint to my shower goal, since, if we’ve left before that amount of time has elapsed, we haven’t taken showers at the gym.
I also revisited my last attempt at creating a Tasker profile to automatically lock my phone after 3 minutes of use. The original idea was to only have it do this in the evenings, say, after 7pm. Currently it’s doing it all day. I’m pretty sure I’ll end up modifying it to only be active in the evenings as originally planned, but, in the meantime, I’m viewing it as an experiment to see how long I can go with the restriction in effect 24/7.
Burndown Metric
I’m still working on shifting my processes to support me as a salaried employee vs a contractor. As a contractor, even though all my contracts were fixed bid, I’d still track myself based on hours worked. Since becoming an employee again, I’ve created an algorithm that posts to a /burndown goal the number of estimated hours I’ve completed rather than the number of hours I literally worked.
It’s a little bit complicated in practice, but the simplest way to communicate the distinction is this: If I work 2 hours and complete a new task I had estimated to take 4 hours, a straight hourly approach would record 2, for the 2 hours I worked. My new approach records 4, since I effectively completed 4 hours of work today, even though I did it in two hours.
So far I only have one burndown goal, which tracks all my defined sprints, including side project and personal sprints. I think it’s becoming clear that this won’t be sufficient long-term, as completing a bunch of work on a personal project does not satisfy my real-world commitment to my employer.
The reason I didn’t start out with multiple burndown goals is partly because there isn’t an easy way to tell Beeminder I only want to be on the hook for a given goal on these specific weekdays. My current employer has a four-day workweek, so, ideally, I’d only want Beeminder to keep me on the hook for my job’s burndown Monday thru Thursday, and TaskRatchet burndown on Friday.
I think I’m going to end up creating a burndown goal specifically for my job regardless. If the scheduling issue proves real, I may have to add a cron job to schedule breaks in the appropriate goals. Sigh.
Summary
| Key |
Value |
| Number of goals |
37 |
| New goals this week |
1 |
| Goals scheduled for archive |
0 |
| Newest goal |
pi-blocks (2019-11-18) |
| Oldest goal |
worktime (2018-06-05) |
| Highest pledge |
worktime ($30.0) |
| Total pledges |
$173.0 |
| Derails this week |
2 |
| Upgrades this week |
6 |
Random Goal: trash
This goal keeps me accountable to regularly take out the trash.
New Goals
-
pi-blocks: Created 2019-11-18. I’ve been waiting until the last minute to post updates on my Beeminder Pi light project, which results in some pretty lackluster updates.
Hoping that this goal will help me actually put in the minimal amount of time required to make real progress.
Derails
Both of the following derails happened on the same day. I had a terrible headache and simply did not have the mental focus required to meet goal requirements.
A skeleton of this summary was generated using a Python script and then carefully filled in by hand.
