Using the break setting tool, I accidentally set breaks for a bunch of goals for a whole week, since I clicked “save” forgetting I hadn’t yet pasted in the real date. Oops. 
I’m looking at this as an unplanned experiment. What changes if I don’t have these goals for a week? Some of them I’m pretty sure I’ll fix pretty quickly, but maybe I’ll find I don’t miss some others.
I’ve also decided to replace all my ynab-* goals with one ynab-all goal that will have me reconciling all YNAB account once or twice a week. The hope is that it will reduce the amount of maintenance work associated with all the separate Beeminder goals and help me to better block my time. We’ll see how it goes. 
Today I split ynab-all into ynab-family and ynab-nathan–the first is for reconciling our family budget, the second is for reconciling my self-employment / business budget.
I also went ahead and split my upgrades goal into seven separate upgrade-* goals, one for each major area of my life.
I’ve been playing around with Android Automate, and I’ve liked it so much that I’ve gone ahead and payed the ~$4 to get premium. The free version is pretty limited in how many flows / blocks you can have running at a time.
I’m trying a potential solution to this. I manage all my work tasks in Workflowy. Workflowy has a feature that will email me a daily summary of changes to my lists. I’ve enabled this feature, and will be going through these emails and pulling out “UVI’s” to add to my done list document when I do my normal email processing, which I also beemind.
Using Workflowy summary emails to populate my done list has been working great. 
The friction to adding another item in Workflowy and then immediately checking it off, knowing it will then appear in my summary email, is way lower than having to pull up my done document and edit that. Also, this system encourages me to be a bit more thorough planning my work ahead of time.
I just added a new Beeminder goal for scheduling Friday breaks for my day job. (They’re only open Monday through Thursday.) This is the workaround to not being able to customize weekend breaks to include Fridays, and it seems like it shouldn’t be that much work to keep up with. I’ve given it an effective rate of 1 per week, but I expect to create 3 or 4 breaks every time I add a datapoint, so I should get ahead super quickly.
I’ve been dog-fooding TaskRatchet, and loving it! Being able to take that one nagging task I know I need to do but don’t have a clear plan to make it happen and plop it into TaskRatchet is such a satisfyingly stress-relieving action. And that’s in spite of how incredibly rough the product currently is! So I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the future of the product once I’m able to actually get it semi-polished. Also, my wife, who has definitely not been a monetary-commitment-contracts kind of person, has started using it, and likes it! 
Just modified my Android Automate flow that posts to my /sms goal to set the value for each data point to the number of different people I’ve texted that day. That way I’m encouraged to text different people throughout the day. I’ve set the Beeminder goal to use the max aggday function. Here’s a screenshot of the flow. If you want more details, let me know and I’ll be happy to share. 
I’m really enjoying having my /sms goal count recipients. I’ve upped my commitment to 2.5 recipients / day.
I’ve also found that combining my ynab account reconciliation goals into ynab-family for the shared budget and ynab-nathan for my business budget has made the process of reconciliation much more efficient–basically the benefits of time blocking.
Had a bunch of beemergencies today, including weight, which meant I fasted today. Derailed on two goals today (not weight), one of which I’m going to be calling non-legit on. So, considering how hard Beeminder made me work today, I think I’m calling that a success.
Several of these beemurgencies were significantly more difficult than they would have been because of the week-long break I scheduled on a bunch of them a while back. Inbox-clearing goals become more difficult the longer I go between satisfying them. I don’t really like that fact, but I’m willing to live with it given how well my inbox clearing goals otherwise work for me.
Still having lots of fun with Android Automate.
For the past three months I’ve been having Automate randomly query my energy levels and symptoms throughout the day. Yesterday my wife and I started looking at the data, in combination with my food journal, to see if we could find find any patterns in my energy levels and headaches. We’ve found some interesting things, but still have more digging to do.
Related to the energy query flow: I’ve just modified the scheduler to just ask me whenever I unlock my phone, instead of doing it randomly. It makes the flow a lot simpler, has the advantage of not interrupting me when I’m in the middle of something, and is probably good enough from a stats perspective.
With her permission, I also just modified the flow to text my wife my current energy level and symptoms. She may find receiving a text every time I open my phone to be incredibly annoying, or maybe it’ll be useful for her to know how I’m feeling pretty much all the time. Also, maybe I’ll unlock my phone less, knowing that my wife will know every time I do? We’ll see. 
I also used Automate to reproduce something like a zeno alert system so my phone will say out loud: “7.3 hours to save $5!” on roughly the Beeminder notification schedule. I have been having Tasker just say “Beeminder emergency!” every time I get a zeno alert SMS from Beeminder, but this has the disadvantage of not telling me how much time I have left. Also, it tends to result in my phone saying “Beeminder emergency!” over and over and over at certain times during the day, which can get pretty irritating. My new system should only make one announcement at a time, summing all the stakes for goals that are due at the nearest identical deadline.
Just set up a script to post data points to a Beeminder goal with my daily time spent on a work project, as recorded by WakaTime. If it goes well, I may add Beeminder goals for other programming projects, too.
Just switched over a bunch of my goals to a 10am deadline, since they were conflicting with my work goals. My goals now have deadlines roughly based on which of three categories they belong to:
| Category | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Chores and other personal-productive type goals | 10am |
| Work goals | 5pm |
| Relaxation, community, and evening routine goals | Various, mostly 7:30pm and midnight |
Anyway, I’m treating this as a big experiment. Worst case scenario, this ends up stressing me out during the evenings and I have to change my deadlines again. Best case scenario, it helps me get some momentum going in the morning while protecting the rest of the day for my work.
I find it really hard to get going in the morning, too. I know I’m productive in the later hours of the day but I want to have that time to play games with my friends and want to have done my work for that day by then. Let’s not forget: If you’re industrious early, you can be lazy for longer later.
How can Beeminder help with that? I got a couple of ideas but not a good one.
It’s an interesting question. Moving deadlines around is the obvious answer, but maybe there are other things that could be done, too? Maybe a goal for executing a work shutdown routine by such-and-such a time every day? 
Or, at the other end, a goal for getting started with work by a certain time?
I used to have a goal like that, which required that I be at my desk by a specific time each morning. Now my work routine goal serves some of the same purpose, if somewhat more leniently, since it has a 9am deadline, so if it’s an emergency day I have to be at my desk by 9am.
Unrelated: In the past I beeminded when I got to bed, which could be quite difficult and stressful. More recently I’ve been beeminding when I start getting ready for bed, which can still be difficult at times, but is generally much easier to manage, and just about as effective, if not more.
I just initiated the process of replacing my /posture goal with a new goal, /posture-on. Basically the old goal required that I wear my posture-correcting vest a certain amount of time per week, but that could get tricky to remember to put it on well enough before the deadline to get the required time in. The new goal will only require that I put the device on, and not stipulate how long I leave it on. My theory is that putting it on is all that’s really necessary, since I have no great aversion to leaving it on once I put it on. I’m not going to track it, but I half-expect that I’ll end up wearing it more than I have been with the old goal.
Just modified my automate sms flow to exclude texts to my wife from counting towards my sms goal. This was mainly because I now have automate sending her status texts which shouldn’t count towards me being more social.
All the folks talking about using physical objects to track / motivate behaviors inspired me to try the approach on my deep work routine, which has been getting a bit too loose for comfort over time.
Here’s the contraption:
Each of the four colored blocks corresponds with a single phase of my routine:
| Color | Phase |
|---|---|
| Blue | Commit to work on a single task with a zero datapoint and the task in the description. |
| White | Close all tabs and windows not required to complete the selected task. |
| Navy | Set a timer for 25 minutes and work on the selected task until the timer rings. |
| Green | Update the datapoint’s value to 1 to indicate that I successfully fulfilled my commitment. |
Each round piece in the left tower represents one pomodoro. I plan to take one off the top and place it somewhere in front of the phase bricks while I work on the pomodoro, and then add it to a new tower on the right once its completed.
Hopefully this will help me to remember to follow all the steps for each of my pomodoros!
This is beautiful. I need to go find my lego pieces now!
A while back I had tried cloning TagTime using Tasker (since the TagTime Beeminder integration doesn’t work for me), but basically gave up on it. Today I decided to try again, this time with Android Automate, and I just finished it. If anyone wants the flow, I’m happy to share.
The impetus for going ahead and trying again was that my job responsibilities have been shifting recently in such a way that I can no longer rely on pomodoros to track all the time I spend on the job. I’ll still be tracking pomodoros, but I plan to rely on the new TagTime-like stochastic time tracking system to ensure I put in enough time in general.
Today I deleted my /gratitude journal because scrambling to think of something I was grateful for before I derailed didn’t really feel like it was serving the purpose.
I added a clause to my global fineprint to give my wife more control over goals related to her:
- [A derail is not legit if] The goal is related to my wife and she decides she’d rather I do something else instead or nothing at all.
I also worked on migrating towards stochastic time tracking instead of pomodoros for work time tracking. I’ll still be using pomodoros, but not as a way to ensure I work long enough.
Looking forward to seeing how this works for me. 
