Last year, a bunch of us got together and committed to try to make a new goal each month in 2024. Personally, I tried out stuff like journalling in the morning, stopping snacking by 3 hours before bed, and messaging a friend each day – and for the most part I managed to use the format to make each month an opportunity to make a new resolution (rather than waiting until 2025).
So once again, at the start of each month in 2025 I intend to set up a new goal for a new habit. I’ll deliberately set it to end at the end of the month, so if it doesn’t work well, it’s out of the way then (though I expect that I’ll keep some of them rolling after the end of the month in the end, for at least some amount of time).
Want to join me?
Rules:
Post here and let me know you’re in!
At the start of each month (say before the 7th of the month), post about your new goal. If it’s private, you don’t have to share all the gory details – just whatever you’re comfortable with. You can set the goal’s end date to the last day of the month, so you don’t have to be committed to it any more than that. Everything about the goal is up to you!
Feel free to create yourself an “index post” that you’ll update to keep track of your goals/posts and make it easy to see what you’ve done overall. I can link to that in the Hall of Participants if you like!
Share your progress updates every so often. Have you found a perfect goal? Have you struggled with something? Did something turn out to be a non-starter? Whether it’s good or bad, just share a little about the process for accountability’s sake, if that works for you.
You might want to create a goal to help you remember to make your goal at the beginning of each month…
No shame and no brow-beating! If something doesn’t work, that’s fine. If you derail, that’s fine (derailing is not failing, anyway). If you forget a month or your goal is such a bad fit you have to end it early, or a life thing gets in the way, it’s all fine. The spirit is experimentation and accountability… but flexibility is important too.
Join whenever you can or want to!
NB: This is separate to my New Year’s Resolutions thread, and you don’t have to do both or anything. I’m just taking any excuse to make some little changes and get myself enthusiastic about them, as well as nail my colours to the mast for one really important goal.
I will be trying to participate more reliably this year. Most of my goals will probably be somewhere along the same theme, as per my post here (which also explains my goal for January).
For January, I will be trying to submit birding checklist with eBird more regularly. Transferred manually from the “total checklists this year” (tried various ways to automate, none worked). Autoratcheting to 15 days. The idea: to break the trend that I am mostly submitting checklists when I am in exciting “exotic” places and go for weeks without observations when I am in the home mode. Backyard observations from the kitchen window still count.
I’ve selected my first goal! I’ve been having trouble keeping up with chores and finding my chore app overwhelming. I want to do a bit of a reset on that, and also just establish a habit of fitting in one chore no matter how busy I am. It’s got to be possible!
As a bit of an explanation for my first month’s goal: I would like to get 2024 paperwork out of my office and filed away as soon as possible. Obviously, I can’t take care of all of this for December yet since paperwork takes time before it even gets to me, but based on what I currently have in my office, I should be able to get everything through the end of November done.
Fine print: I put the should in there because physical paperwork is the devil. There could easily be something that was lost, destroyed, not filled out in the first place, or next spring a driver will sheepishly come to me and say they deep-cleaned their truck and found a six-month-old scale ticket under the floor mat. I also obviously cannot close out loads that have not been paid. So, the metric I will be using is the number of bills of lading through the end of November that I currently have marked as not filed. That number is currently 559. So by the end of the month, I should have the paperwork that I have for these loads sorted, and payment status verified. If a load is still marked as unpaid, or has missing paperwork noted, I’m not going to count that against myself for the purposes of this goal, even though that is still something I need to deal with.
intensity (avg. 35 minutes of "Garmin Intensity minutes per day)
Technically this isn’t new to this year, but I’m pretty new to Beeminder and I like the idea of reviewing and iterating every month, so I’ll keep working with it and see how realistic it is.
I’m not really a New Years Resolutions kind of person, but this sort of experimenting and trying new things is absolutely up my alley! I’ve been a bit stale with my beeminder goals over the last year or so (2024 was not my year) so it’ll be good to rethink some of them and see what comes up. Here is my metagoal, although I don’t know how to make it all cute and steppy like Nicky’s: newmonthresolution – lanthala – beeminder
January: beeminder
This is yet another variant on my “get my bedtime stuff done before bedtime” wish; I’ve given beeminder a lot of money over the years for those goals. This version is do-less, and I’ve started with “no more than 1 beeminder goal red at 8pm per two days”, which feels pretty doable. We’ll see how it goes!
Outcome: This worked fantastically! I added the additional quirk that if none of my (non-timed) goals are at orange, I can add a -1 instead.
February: -beeminding-orange – lanthala – beeminder
February is the start of bee season here, and I need to start checking my beehive for mites, adding extra boxes, and generally interacting with them as we get into our spring. I set the slope to once every 10 days currently, but I might dial it to once every 15+ days as things move along (generally, you want to inspect every other week if things are going well).
Re: cute and steppy: I did it by knowing the graph editor really well and thus knowing how to make it play ball, basically. But what I can do is provide an example to sort-of copy if anyone likes (should work in either the on-page graph editor or via the graph matrix in the visual one):
(Hopefully you can see that well enough. It’s basically setting a rate of 0 until the day I want to be the cutoff, which in this case is the 4th of each month, and then a jump for the vertical axis of +1 per month. I’m using last year’s goal again, so that’s why it starts at 13 and goes up to 24, instead of 1 through 12.)
Progress so far: despite being a very loosey-goosey vague goal, my “do a single chore each day” is working surprisingly well. For some reason, it spontaneously galvanised me to actually properly scrub the bathtub, a chore I’d been avoiding for cough let’s just say too long, because it was the possible/plausible chore I disliked least of the ones that came to mind. I actually did it right before showering one evening, thus getting my goal for the next day done well in advance, just on impulse. That kind of “hah, I’m getting ahead!” feeling is preeeetty powerful for me, which is worth me keeping in mind.
I don’t think it can be a goal on its own without any other kind of prompt to do housework, because chores are endless and sometimes you need to do two things in one day (especially kitchen-related things, though Lisa does most of those), but at least until the end of my degree (June!) it might actually be the best way to ensure something always gets done even when I’m overwhelmed?
Update: Barring anything unforseen, I might be able to wrap this up early next week. Actually getting stuff to the archives at my employer’s building might have to wait until the week after that though. Either way, *knock on wood* I think I got this.
Update: January bedtime goal is going really well! I added an additional twist, which is that I can add a -1 to the goal if I have no orange goals when I put Alex to bed (modulo my handful of goals that don’t accumulate buffer). That’s been a pretty strong motivator to move things along, and actually incentivized me to create a bunch MORE goals so my usual “things I put off until bedtime” items are all now beemindered and part of this goal. This has resulted in some really nice, relaxed evenings the past couple weeks, where I legitimately have nothing I “have” to do, and has, as hoped, gotten me to bed earlier.
As I thought, I was able to get this goal zeroed out on Tuesday, and all the paperwork is packaged up to make the transfer as quick as possible. Looking at the office calendar, it seems like the building will be sparsely occupied the first week of February which makes it tempting to wait until then to go, but I should probably just go on Monday so that I don’t just leave the boxes sitting in my office indefinitely. (Something I have been guilty of in the past.)
I don’t have a solid idea of what to do for my February goal yet. I have some dance-related projects that I’m working on, but those are hard to quantify and the performances I’m looking at aren’t until May. Maybe just time spent practicing would be a worthy goal down the line.
Cleaning and chores are also something that I have felt constantly behind on since Christmas, and I already use Tody, which counts the number of chores done in a day.
I’m pondering my February goal as well. I kind of want to go with something to help boost how much I’m reading, because I’m a few books behind on my reading goal already. But February will be super busy, since I need to try to get through my entire tuberculosis course… so maybe I should pick something relatively simple, to help me stay afloat with everything else.
But what I can do is provide an example to sort-of copy if anyone likes (should work in either the on-page graph editor or via the graph matrix in the visual one):