I’m also a student (undergrad Math), so ever since restarting Beeminder during this quarantine I’ve 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 “tocks” 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 you’re 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. I’ve used TagTime for around a month and a half to track my hours spent doing course-related work and can’t see myself going back; it makes way too much sense!
But okay, maybe you’re not like me and an umbrella “more time on all study” improvement won’t actually help you that much. That’s 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 I’ve been experimenting with is related to Anki. If you aren’t using Anki, you’re really limiting your study success opportunities. Again, this may seem like I’m looking for a silver bullet approach but after reading through a lot of educational psychology literature, I cannot think of a single subject that wouldn’t 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, it’s really important that we have a systematic tool for learning all this knowledge. That’s 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 don’t finish my reviews but still get 2 pings of studying before the deadline, I’m done and don’t get to watch any Netflx. As Danny describes, it makes a slightly not-fun process more enjoyable because you’re working towards a fun temptation.
That’s actually it from me! For revision that isn’t factual recall, I use Ali Abdaal’s Retrospective Revision spreadsheet to guide my study. I need to Beemind this one as well but haven’t 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 commitments…
…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, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” 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)
I’ve really ranted on but please respond to this with any thoughts you’ve had since posting! I’m 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, I’m 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