So I am trying to create a goal that will help me not procrastinate on my homework. I am currently doing where I need to have 3 todos related to school done today. However I dont think this has been helping as much as like. I thought of doing maybe time based (a certain amount each day) however I feel like this is less flexible if say there is a day in the week that I am gone all day or something and if I get homework done early for a week it really complicates things. With the 3 todos I can just choose smaller tasks. Any suggestions on a type of goal that you think might do better. So far all my other goals have been good, I am new to beeminder, I have only been doing it for 2 weeks. This is the only goal I am having issues figuring out.
Welcome! And great question. It can be agonizing/paralyzing picking the most meaningful metric.
Two quick pointers for now that could be helpful:
- We have a blog post with thoughts and principles for picking a good metric to mind: https://blog.beeminder.com/whattomind
- Thereās a very ancient but classic guest post about using Beeminder for studying that I recommend: https://blog.beeminder.com/gandalf/
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Iām curious - why do you say it hasnāt been helping as much as you like? What seems to be the problem?
Itās usually best to start small and try to do it consistently - so if you have been consistently doing the todos for 2 weeks, maybe give it another week or two and then add more?
I have a goal called frogs which is similar: I have to check off 4 a day from my to-do list. What Iāve noticed is that thereās a lot more friction for some tasks than others, either in terms of time spent, aversion to doing the task, or both. So Iāve added in a point system: each task gets from 1 (put on a load of laundry) to 3 (do my husbandās business bookkeeping). So far thatās been really helping me take on the things that I would otherwise push out until they became a problem.
The other thing Iāve noticed about using Beeminder in general is that it works much, much better for me if data is automatically sent to my goal from elsewhere, instead of me having to enter it manually. For this goal, I set up an applet at IFTTT to add data to frogs when I check an item off a list in iOS Reminders. (I had the list of tasks there already, and I was checking them off there already. Bonus Beeminder input!)
To incorporate the 1ā3 point scale, I write each to-do item in Reminders as ā1 laundryā or ā3 bookkeepingā and then use NUM[] in the IFTTT applet to extract that number. I can imagine that at this point youāre looking at me like Iāve just written down the wave equation for pink elephants appearing over Miami. Iāll just put this screenshot here, and if youād like more wordage, let me know.
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Iām also a student (undergrad Math), so ever since restarting Beeminder during this quarantine Iāve spent a lot of time thinking about how to Beemind my studies and have been lurking in these forums far too long not to reply to this!
Before starting Beeminder, my biggest issue was actually sitting down and getting started doing work. So, my first school work-related goal was beeminding 8 ātocksā per day automatically using Clockwork Tomato and Tasker (h/t Brent Yorgey). This was a huge improvement over the very small amount of work I was doing previously and the steppy graph was a huge motivator to keep going.
However, after doing a bit of reading of the Messy Matters and Beeminder blogs I started to question whether this was really the best I could possibly do. After all, tracking time manually leaves the possibility that youāre unfairly counting procrastination or daydreaming, which you can easily forget at the end of your tock or Pomodoro. Luckily, @dreev has done a lot of thinking on the part of everyone who has ever thought about this topic and expressed exactly this problem here along with the elegant solution to it in TagTime. Iāve used TagTime for around a month and a half to track my hours spent doing course-related work and canāt see myself going back; it makes way too much sense!
But okay, maybe youāre not like me and an umbrella āmore time on all studyā improvement wonāt actually help you that much. Thatās fair enough; it started to plateau a little for me eventually as well and I needed something more specific to strive for.
Another study-related goal Iāve been experimenting with is related to Anki. If you arenāt using Anki, youāre really limiting your study success opportunities. Again, this may seem like Iām looking for a silver bullet approach but after reading through a lot of educational psychology literature, I cannot think of a single subject that wouldnāt benefit from its use where the goal is long-term learning.
To briefly summarise a vast (and really interesting!) field of research on factual knowledge, higher-order thinking skills and capacities that all subjects try to develop like creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, etc. are all intertwined with and depend on vast expanses of factual knowledge stored in our long-term memory (interesting further reading here, here )
Therefore, itās really important that we have a systematic tool for learning all this knowledge. Thatās where Anki comes in! Some timeless pieces on how to use it:
My current Anki goal is a do-more goal in which I temptation-bundle my Anki reviews with Netflix watching (shamelessly stolen from @dreev; thanks for the great idea!!). I have 1.5 hours a day in which I need to complete all my Anki reviews, counted using TagTime (so 2 pings). If I finish my reviews before the 2 pings, I get to watch Netflix for the remaining time. If I donāt finish my reviews but still get 2 pings of studying before the deadline, Iām done and donāt get to watch any Netflx. As Danny describes, it makes a slightly not-fun process more enjoyable because youāre working towards a fun temptation.
Thatās actually it from me! For revision that isnāt factual recall, I use Ali Abdaalās Retrospective Revision spreadsheet to guide my study. I need to Beemind this one as well but havenāt gotten around to it yet. I think anything more than that is probably a bit too granular for me personally because I have a lot of other commitmentsā¦
ā¦which brings me to my last point. Another really important thing to recognise with Beeminder is that using it can help illuminate the apocryphal quote, āWhen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.ā Your productivity in your studies is tied to a lot of other, seemingly unrelated variables that you may not have considered. For instance, fatigue, anxiety and depression may rear their ugly head from too big a focus on only one thing. This might not be directly caused by studying itself but rather from the absence of other things. Beeminding:
- your social life to meet your social needs
- your exercise to meet your physical needs and boost your mental health
- your study deadline to make sure you finish your daily tasks by 5pm
- an old hobby to boost your mental health, among other benefits
could all have indirect benefits and improve your study-related outcomes too (n=1, anecdotal etc. but focusing on all of these have really helped me)
Iāve really ranted on but please respond to this with any thoughts youāve had since posting! Iām committed to Beeminder for the long run and recognise that my usage in the first 2 months is probably far from optimal 
EDIT: for miscellaneous tasks, Iām using complice.co right now and The One Must-Do Task Each Day | Beeminder Blog, Trello and other things before Beeminder but am not really sure what the best solution is for a system per se here. Danny has published this: Mark Forster's Final Version which may be of use, i.e. beeminding chains of tasks in the system described. https://www.amazingmarvin.com/ looks promising and I might give it a go after finishing my Complice trial
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I think to offer more specific help to @linux535 we really need to know what the problem is with the current system. But here are some more things Iāve found helpful:
I did not personally find Complice to be helpful at all, to say the least - it just wants to shoehorn you into its own philosophy of how you should work, which I did not find to be effective. Instead Iād recommend TaskRatchet (by our own @narthur) or Boss As A Service (by our own @manasvinik). They are just far superior in every way in my opinion, more motivating, better designed, better interface, and much more flexibility to use the tools how you want to, instead of the inferior and ineffective way that Complice seems to think I should work.
Regarding Amazing Marvin, have you looked at MLO at all (My Life Organized)? It could best be described as āa thinking personās Amazing Marvin.ā Again, just far more powerful and flexible, with all the good things about Amazing Marvin. And it has functional phone apps, which is a must for me, unlike the seriously crippled phone app for Amazing Marvin.
So Iād encourage you to ditch the fairly useless (in my opinion) Complice and Amazing Marvin, and substitute far more functional tools - if you donāt like the ones I mentioned, there are plenty of others that donāt constrain you in such a frustrating way.
Can you explain what you mean by this? What do you mean about unfairly counting procrastination?
Say I set a pomodoro for 15 minutes. I donāt expect that I will always be functioning at 100% efficiency - so in that 15 minutes itās likely there will be a little bit of distraction or slowness of some sort, which is fine with me.
Iāve found just the act of tracking time manually to help keep me on track, because Iām the one in control - I can choose exactly when to start and stop and write a new line in my notebook. I never had much luck with TagTime, mostly because I always keep my phone on silent and I would hate to be interrupted in the middle of sex or something. The last thing I want is to have to be monitoring my phone for alerts every waking moment.
You mentioned Anki as being helpful (though I would personally be very cautious of anything Gwern says - I havenāt found his writings to be fair, helpful, or accurate). One thing you might also consider is Dual N-backing - itās similar to Anki in that it works your memory, but it increases your working memory, basically giving you more RAM or ādesk spaceā in your head to process stuff. I can literally feel my mind getting bigger when I do it!
Hey, now, thereās room enough for many approaches. 
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Fair enough - I was just saying what I personally found helpful and unhelpful. Some people may really mesh with the Complice philosophy and find it to be a useful tool.
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Yeah my Complice trial finishes today and I donāt think Iāll buy a subscription but I do appreciate that it got me thinking much harder about how to connect short term tasks to long-term goals, which Iāll carry over into my Beeminder usage.
Iāve seen a few of those applications in passing and will look over them today by 11pm, which is going straight into my commits do more goal that I ripped from @dreevās I-Will System! SIdenote: Unfortunately I have zero clue how to code or program so I donāt think I can qualify for usage of the actual commits.to, but Iāve found that this makeshift goal has been really useful in all areas of my life. Given the topic of the thread is study, Iāll mention that the group assignments Iāve done this semester have vastly benefitted from me modelling and following through on these explicit deadlines for other group members.
Iām realising now that Iām coming off super preachy in this, as though Iāve read a few Beeminder blogs/forum posts etc. and am suddenly the worldās authority on Beeminder usageā¦I can totally relate to not wanting to check my phone every few minutes as I have notifications turned off for basically everything, which I started doing after reading a lot of Cal Newportās writing. Iām also wary that this could have an adverse impact on productivity, but I donāt know the literature well enough to have a super informed take on this. All of these things are really an n=1 experiment in productivity and Iāll say that for me personally, I wasnāt satisfied with the accuracy I was getting from tracking 45 min blocks and āunfairly counting procrastinationā refers to me having the timer count tocks automatically and thus Iād have some tocks where Iād be daydreaming/doing something else in the tock but still counted equally as a fully focused period of time. More than anything, I was curious about exactly where my time was going, so I decided to try out TagTime. This is more of an ongoing experiment than a full-on adoption of TagTime everything.
Iām not really a big reader of Gwern, although I do have a lot of his stuff saved in Pocket to get through eventually. I included him there because itās an article that is referred to by many when speaking about SRS and the extent of the literature he cites shows that itās not just some study-hack gimmick. Iāve only recently heard of Dual N-backing in particular but Iāve read a tiny bit of the discourse around the working memory training literature. One meta-analysis:
Currently available working memory training programs have been investigated in a wide range of studies involving typically developing children, children with cognitive impairments (particularly ADHD), and healthy adults. Our meta-analyses show clearly that these training programs give only near-transfer effects, and there is no convincing evidence that even such near-transfer effects are durable. The absence of transfer to tasks that are unlike the training tasks shows that there is no evidence these programs are suitable as methods of treatment for children with developmental cognitive disorders or as ways of effecting general improvements in adultsā or childrenās cognitive skills or scholastic attainments. (link)
While I donāt think itās totally impossible to increase your working memory capacity (I just donāt know the science and literature well enough), my primitive understanding of educational/cognitive psychology on memory and learning leads me to personally believe that itās a better, safer bet to focus on increasing the knowledge you possess in your long-term memory, the capacity of which is basically unlimited. This kind of hacks your working memory in itself, because if you have more knowledge in long-term memory you can āchunkā connected pieces of knowledge together and get around the infamous 4+/-1 limit on working memory.
My preference for building up knowledge also stems from the fact that I had a pretty limited education in primary and higher schooling in regards to the social and physical sciences, so Dual N-back training is less of a priority for me personally than, say, learning about the Cold War or how chromosomes actually work, which is knowledge that would be strange for an educated adult not to know.
sidenote: this is genuinely the only online place that Iāve posted/participated in other than Twitter, which Iāve commented on sparsely and my first comments have been exceedingly long. I wonder what draws people to be so active in this forum? Is it because the founders are dogfooding by leaving comments and starting threads about how they use their own product? Is it the sunk cost of purchasing a subscription? Could it be a selection effect from the friendliness/willingness of people to help around here? I suspect itās obviously a bit of all of them but curious how of the variance in peopleās commenting each of those reasons explains
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TaskRatchet looks really well-designed! I am excited to try it later today
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I think realizing that youāre in an n=1 experiment is a pretty great insight. I go even fartherāif something works for you, but no one elseā¦ itās probably still be valuable
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I feel like it is hard to define what a proper todo for school is. As some tasks are way easier then others so 3 todoās one day might be 10x easier then another day. I guess it just feels inconsistent and hence I dont get as much as I should done. Thanks for the reply sorry for the delay its finals week and things are just now starting to calm down
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Hi, sorry for a delay in response its finals week so things have been crazy. First I would like to thank you for your detailed reply you have given my some ideas on what I might do.
I have normally used Quizlet for studying but Anki looks really interesting, I plan on looking into during my 3 week break from school. It uses LaTeX which is something I actually want to learn to use.
TagTime sounds really interesting but I was having issues finding it, do you have a link?
I am also going to look into this also. Again thank you for your detailed response it is greatly appreciated.
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I messed around with TaskRatchet a bit and seems kind of like GTbee without the ability to delete tasks. However GTbee has been effective for short term tasks. Boss As A Service seems interesting but a bit costly. Thank you for the recommendations.
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I like the idea of a point system this is something I will look into. Thank you for the response. Sorry for the delay in response it is finals week at my university and things are just now starting to calm down.
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Yeah this is why I kind of hesitate to Beemind to-dos (other than a single must-do which I linked in my other comment). However, breaking your projects down into atomised units still seems pretty useful. Here is a really nice anecdote by an education writer named Daisy Christodoulou that illustrates why:
In my first week at university, I remember buying a small notepad to keep a list of all the things I needed to remember now I was living away from home. Amongst some quite mundane tasks like āregister with GPā, āget a library cardā and āfind out if the union will be showing West Hamās next matchā, I also absent-mindedly added in āwrite essayā. The first few weeks of term slipped by and while the other items on the list were quickly ticked off, āwrite essayā remained. I started new lists on different pages, but āwrite essayā remained, looming horribly at me amid reminders about milk and discount travelcards.
A few years later I read David Allenās productivity book, Getting Things Done , which offered some brilliant advice on avoiding this problem. Allen recommends that when you are trying to get something done, you should āwrite down the very next physical action required to move the situation forwardā. The advantage of this is that it gives you more clarity about what you have to do.
Based on this, some of the items on my list were great. For example, āgo to the union and ask if they are showing West Hamās next matchā is great. Itās very clear what to do and easy to tick off once it has been done. āWrite essayā, on the other hand, is terrible. Itās the kind of list item that ends up scaring you because itās too big. Itās so vague that you donāt know where to start ā so you donāt get started. And even if you do put in some work on it, you probably wonāt be able to tick off the whole item, which is demotivating.
My memory might be failing me but I think I remember a forum post in which @zedmango and @narthur were preaching the virtues of that same book to @dreev haha; it has a lot of really interesting insights around to-do systems but thatās one that I think about and use often
Hereās the link to install on PC but itās a very involved installation process! I donāt know my way around computers so have resigned myself to using the Android version, which you can find on the Play Store by searching TagTime.
All good, feel free to keep the thread going and keep us posted with your progress 
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Yes definitely. I love that book and I had a similar āwrite essayā experience - when I read the book my mind was just blown. He explains it all so simply and clearly.
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I tried this watered-down version of GTD before Beeminder but it never really stuck. Do you still use straight up GTD and if so, what kind of Beeminder goals do you use to support it?
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Just wanted to jump in real quick to say that TaskRatchet is a super early-stage service, so please, please, please donāt hesitate to email me at nathan@taskratchet.com at the first sign of brokenness, bugginess, frustration, or missing features. All feedback is valuable!
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