@dreev’s suggestion to fast on days I’m above the road really seems to be working for me. 
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y’all with your weight goals! I’m glad it’s working for you. I personally have much MUCH better success with beeminding logging all my calories daily. Works like a treat! I lost 6kg since start of November. It’s not crazy fast, but it’s very consistent and that’s so much more important.
So, maybe, if you ever find your weight goal not doing it for you anymore, consider doing that instead 
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Oh, I think it should absolutely be both! Unless you happen to be a weirdo like me who enjoys edge-skating a weight goal. This reminds me that I was talking to a user recently who was so excited about Atomic Habits that they felt like they wouldn’t need Beeminder anymore and were considering ending all their goals. My hopefully-not-overly-defensive reaction (actually adapted from a thing I’d recently said to @bee in yet another context (parenting, weirdly) (previous parenthetical also works without the comma!)):
This reminds me of arguments I’ve made about beeminding one’s weight even though you despise skating the edge of your weight road. If skating the edge sucks enough then it’s worth finding ways to not skate it. But skating it is better than gradually becoming obese. So you do the portion control and exercise or whatever in addition to beeminding, not instead of. Maybe it’s like that with Atomic Habits? Ie, Beeminder as self-tracking + insurance, not day-to-day motivation.
I mean, imagine you quit Beeminder and do Atomic Habits but Atomic Habits doesn’t stick and you end up with nothing, dying alone, forlorn. If you keep Beeminder, maybe make all your yellow brick roads nice and easy, and then add Atomic Habits with the (meta) goal of having tons of safety buffer on all your Beeminder goals so you never have to think about them… Then if Atomic Habits should fail you, Beeminder will still be there to catch you.
So that’s my theory with beeminding weight if you hate beeminding weight. Namely, still do it, just also beemind other things with the (meta) goal of making the weight-minding a no-brainer.
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Turns out that, me personally, I’d much rather fast once a week than have to bother with counting calories. 
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I’ve stopped using stochastic time tracking for now. I’m still fascinated by the technique, but I don’t think it’s really supporting what I’m trying to do right now. I need space to focus, and getting interrupted by my version of TagTime was making it harder for me to have that.
Instead, I’m switching to traditional time tracking using Toggl, along with my existing system for pomodoros.
In addition, I’m playing with switching away from Workflowy to Notion for tracking my work tasks. I love Workflowy, but I need to improve how I’m prioritizing my tasks, and I think Notion’s table views have a better shot at allowing me to do that consistently. We’ll see how it goes.
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I just modified my personal zeno alert Automate flow so that it now also texts my wife with my nearest deadline and the items due by that deadline. It’s an experiment; maybe she won’t like it and I’ll turn it off. But I already have my phone texting my wife to let her know my energy level when I report it, and it’s seemed quite useful as a way to keep her aware of how my day is going.
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Michelle likes seeing my zeno alerts (and she’s even saved me from derailing once or twice!) so the change stays for now.
I’ve scheduled my food-journal goal for archive. Journaling my food has become habitual, so I don’t think I need the Beeminder goal now. At least, that’s the theory. We’ll see how it goes. 
I’m pretty far into switching from Workflowy to Notion, and I definitely think there are some real advantages, though I think it’s going to be quite a while before I figure out how my setup should be. Notion is so free-form you can do pretty much anything you can imagine, which can be a bit intimidating when you’re starting from scratch.
One thing that the switch from Notion has enabled is the creation of more elaborate startup and shutdown rituals. Having rituals you follow when you start work and when you stop is something that Cal Newport recommends (in his book Deep Work I believe, and here’s a related blog article of his).
Here are my rituals as they stand currently:
Startup
- Locate bottle
- Clear desk
- Breathe
- Review purpose
- Review Today’s Five (defined yesterday)
- Time block (Cal Newport-style)
-
Mark ritual complete
Shutdown
- Email zero
- Notion zero (clear my task inbox inside Notion)
- Go through Daily Reflection Notion page (consists of tasks due within one week, projects due within one week, tasks not updated within the last week, and the task that hasn’t been updated for the longest time [neglect-minding style!])
- Define tomorrow’s Top Five
- Send tomorrow’s Top Five to to my boss in slack
-
Mark ritual complete
- Shutdown computer
I have these rituals as checklists in Notion that I work through at the start and the end of the work day.
Anyway, I expect all this will continue to change pretty quickly in the near future.
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I’m going ahead and archiving eight of my Beeminder goals. A selection below:
- food-journal because I journal my food without the goal and procrastinate entering data in the goal, so I think it’s useful days are done.
- spanish because I thought using Duolingo would be a good way to connect with an old friend. Duolingo is not a way to connect with an old friend.
- unplugged-blocks because my outside goal helps me unplug more than my unplugged-blocks goal does. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I unplug enough, but it does mean that this goal isn’t working very well.
- ping because it was related to my brief experiment with stochastic time tracking.
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This cracked me up! What happened?
Also curious what happened with this and why you gave up on it!
Duolingo just isn’t a very social app, so if you have an old friend you want to keep in touch with, Duolingo probably isn’t going to help you with that. 
(I know, I probably should have realized that before I even tried it.)
I gave up on stochastic time tracking because getting interrupted at work is counterproductive to my attempts at fostering my ability to work deeply.
Update
I have a load goal that tracks an urgency metric, and it just hit the red today for the first time, sending me scrambling to make progress on all goals in sight. It was a hectic day. We’ll see how this goal works for me long-term now that I’ve used up all my buffer. 
I also modified my zeno alert Automate flow to include the load metric in my notifications, and also post it to my load goal instead of relying on my old script that only updates it once per hour.
Also, my sms goal was getting junk data posted to it, and I didn’t know from where. Just realized yesterday that I had first tried to set the goal up using IFTTT before switching to Android Automate because the IFTTT applet wasn’t working for me. But the IFTTT applet started working again later, and that’s where the junk data was coming from. After disabling the applet, all was well again.
I could see that, though I can also relate to @dreev’s perspective that it doesn’t feel like an interruption because it’s a reminder to stay on task. For me it was the non-work interruptions that made it annoying or unworkable.
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At @zedmango’s suggestion, I just switched my load goal to non-cumulative. I already think, having seen both graphs, that it’s much easier to see trends in a cumulative graph, since small differences in day-to-day loads result in shifts and swings in the slope of the data points, whereas this doesn’t happen in a non-cumulative graph since every data point stands alone.
I am hopeful, however, that using a non-cumulative graph will make it easier to manage edge skating on the goal. I’m not sure I can quite articulate why I think it will be easier with a non-cumulative graph. My fuzzy theory is that using a cumulative graph to measure urgency load gives the metric some “momentum” which is hard to overcome on an emergency day, probably for the same reason it’s a good visual tracking metric. Switching away from a cumulative graph may remove this “momentum effect,” as each day stands on its own, and make it easier to satisfy the beemergency.
This could be very far from the truth. Time will tell how it actually works for me.
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Ooh, this is counter to my predictions (like I’d expect cumulative graphs to work better for edge-skating) but I don’t understand very well yet and am eager to hear the results of this experiment!
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I’ve scheduled skipped-suppers for archive. Knowing that eating supper will result in my having to fast sooner should probably be enough of an incentive most of the time.
You can think of urgency load as sort of a whittle-down type goal - you’re trying to reduce your total load to 0, and you wouldn’t make a whittle-down goal cumulative, would you?
In my view, it’s because the thing you are measuring isn’t suited for a cumulative graph. It just doesn’t make any sense to total urgency load across different days. Urgency load already carries over - today’s urgency load is the result of yesterday’s urgency load - so in a sense, it’s already sort of “cumulative” and making it cumulative is double-counting.
Like, say my urgency load yesterday was 20 for 4 goals. Today, my urgency load will be 24, minus whatever additional buffer I’ve gained on those goals, minus one for any goal already over 7 days buffer. Adding that 24 to the 20 from yesterday makes no sense and doesn’t give any meaningful number.
Essentially, urgency load is not “zero-based” - it doesn’t start from scratch at 0 each day.
Consider a goal like “words written today” - every day you start at 0, so it makes sense to total the words written over different days. You get a meaningful number when you do this - the total number of words you’ve written in all the days. But for urgency loads, they don’t start at 0 each day, so there’s no reason for them to be cumulative.
In general, yes, but not for a whittle-down situation like urgency load.
I’ve switched back to using load as just a tracking goal. Skating that goal was defeating the purpose of my existing deadline structure, and stressing me out big time.
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Very sad!
I liked the idea of skating it.
Why was it defeating the purpose and stressing you out?
If load were defined correctly (so it wasn’t a moving target) would that help?
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Biggest problems I think, other than the moving target where:
- It basically made weekend breaks meaningless, since my load would go up during the weekend causing me to have to do work on goals that had weekends off.
- Skating it meant I was constantly doing work on any goals available, regardless of what I’d ideally like to be doing then. I’d set up my deadlines such that personal goals are due in the morning, work goals are due at the end of the work day, and I mostly have the evenings to relax. Edge skating my load goal meant all that careful arranging of deadlines went out the window, since I was trying to get ahead on whatever would give me the most credit on my load goal, regardless of when I should be doing that goal.
Today I also set my morning-pages goal to weekends off. It was one of my last morning goals that wasn’t weekends off, and my wife has been wishing that I wouldn’t be in such a rush on weekend mornings
I’ve created a new Beeminder goal that hopefully will serve the same purpose I was trying to achieve by edge-skating load. It’s called preemptive-blocks, and it requires that I spend 25-minute blocks getting ahead on my goals. The rules are that I have to work on goals, in order of dueness, starting with goals due tomorrow. I’m allowed to skip goals that don’t make sense to get ahead on.
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