January
The yearly birding checklists goal is continuing to run well. I am at 104 checklists now, the goal is regularly ratcheting. I didn’t have an extra monthly challenge goal in March but I might have accidentally done the amount required by the monthly challenge anyways. (I didn’t actually check what were the requirements at eBird for March, as I decided that’s not something I care about. Just pointing that what felt somewhat artificial in February came naturally in March when I did some hiking-and-birding trips with multiple checklists a day in interesting locations.)
February - finished
March - the goal was to read some of the books on my TBR that I purchased for this purpose. I set up the goal in a way that the number of pages increases as the book “ages” in my possession. With the current number, the goal was set in the way that I would need to read ~40 pages from a newly purchased book or ~20 from a year-old, etc., a day, to stay in parallel with the road. I also expressed the hope that I could do enough over March to last me through April, which I didn’t succeed in doing. But I did read 3.5 books during the time since I set up the goal slightly over a month ago - which is 2.5 books more that I would have otherwise. Well, I realized I don’t really care about this enough to continue like that. Especially with the fact that the datapoint grows by itself, so simply “safe for” or “hard cap” don’t really mean much. So I now put the road to increase approximately as much as the datapoint grows by itself - an analogue of a flat spot for this setup, so that I can still plot the datapoints but there’s no pressure. Maybe will restart sometime in the future.
April - I wasn’t sure what goal to do for this month. I don’t want to artificially start something new, because I feel pretty much overwhelmed by the commitments I already have. Most importantly, I need to write up some article manuscripts that I have been researching for lately. So, I will track that for my monthly goal: 2025_apr_draft. I am not the biggest fan of a wordcount setup because I end up writing too much that I have to shorten later but that’s the only thing I can think of for such an amorphous task. Hopefully will be done with this short article much earlier than the end of the month and will proceed to the next piece.