I hope it’s okay to join now. I’m back beeminding after a break of about two years. I’ll count my initial set of 7 goals as the ones for January. From here on I think this will be a great way to introduce new goals. @shanaqui I’d be happy to be in the hall of participants 
Ok, I have come up with my February goal: -beeminding-orange – lanthala – beeminder It is literal beeminding, of my beehive. Yes, I did this at least 40% for the joy of the goal name 
But also, February is the start of bee season here, and I need to start checking 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).
I also have some wondering I’m doing about my safe days on my January goal. The -1 addition has quickly caused the safe days to go bonkers (even when I’m setting the slope at 1/4), which I’m not totally sure how to address. On one hand, if things go south, which at some point I know they will, I’ll start having red goals at bedtime and I’ll stop accumulating -1s, so I don’t want a flat slope at 0 or I’ll just repeatedly derail. On the other hand, having 36 safe days is Way Too Many, even for a goal that’s supposed to be “friendly”.
Maybe the correct choice here is to have my flat slope at 0, but then give a large # of buffer days after a derail? I almost never use that feature, because most of my goals historically haven’t really made sense with it (I don’t get an extra break on changing the ducks’ water just because I forgot one day). But here, it would be an acknowledgement that clearly things aren’t going well in my life, and here’s some time to change the slope of this goal/change the slope of other goals/etc.
Edit: right, I forgot this is a do-less goal. Not so sure how “safe units” works with a do-less goal with a slope of 0. Will it still think I’m safe through the akrasia window, so I can change the slope?
I’m not quite sure what you mean in the last line, but you still can never make goals easier within the akrasia window. That’s probably not what you mean.
A more aggressive slope, but with a bigger buffer on derail, seems like a reasonable option. Another option is to keep the slope unchanged, but regularly dial the buffer down to 1 week when it goes above. (Currently, I regularly increase the slope on goals whenever I get over 1 week of buffer, but if I don’t want to make the slope higher I just ratchet the buffer down to 7.)
I meant the opposite – I’m not sure how do-less goals handle “safe days”, so I don’t know how much derail buffer would give me 7 days of buffer so I can change the future slope and be safe until the new slope kicks in in a week. I think, having thought about it, there’s no actual “safe amount” because I could always, say, have 20 goals red at bedtime, which would derail me even if I had a buffer of 19. I think prooooobably my best choice is to give myself a ridiculous buffer on derail, and then, like you said, ratchet it back to a reasonable amount once any slope changes have kicked in in a week (or if I decide that no slope change is warranted).
All of this is currently quite hypothetical, as I have a buffer of +10 right now, but knowing myself and how this year is going, I suspect that will not last forever.
The January goal of imposing more regular observations submitted to eBird worked just fine. I submitted a total of 21 checklists throughout the month (and might submit another one today), so most of the time I was with a sufficient amount of buffer not to think about this goal at all. But there were a couple of times when the goal moved into the <10 safe days zone, nudging me to break a span without submitted checklists. Exactly as I envisioned for this goal to work. Will be keeping it for a while longer.
For February, I decided to do a goal that nudges me to eat more fresh fruit and veggies. I have been tracking the intake for a few weeks here: 5-a-day, and it appears that I am eating the 5 servings, once recommended by WHO and who not, just fine, without the goal imposing any extra effort on me. So it was serving mostly as a reminder to log the day’s consumption. I have then found that many recommending bodies have updated their recommendations to the vicinity of 7 servings a day. So, for the month of February, that’s what I will try to do. Same goal, but upped to 7/day for the month.
As I wrote in my Beeminder journal thread:
I’d been thinking about some kind of reading goal for February to help me get ahead on my reading goal. It doesn’t seem like the right time to mandate anything intensive, though, since my study schedule is gonna be pretty gruelling. However, I came up with an idea: the tendency I have during stressed out times is to drop my habit of finding small amounts of time to read around everything else. This goal requires a minimum of 3 reading sessions a day (I can check how many reading sessions I’ve had via the app I use, Bookly), and should hopefully keep nudging me to read when I get up, over lunch, and right before sleep. I can make up for it at other times when I have to skip for some reason, and I have placed no requirement on how long the reading session should be.
So I’m off and away with that now!
February goal decided. Earlier in January, the AlRaqs online conference took place. There were tons of great lectures from researchers and dancers about MENAHT dance and culture. However, the conference runs on Central European time and I am in the US Central time zone, so I don’t get to see most of it live. I have 60 days to watch all the recordings before they expire, and in years past I’ve forgotten to go through everything before the expiration date because I think “I have plenty of time,” until I don’t. So, I want to watch them all in February to avoid that. It’s roughly 40 hours of video, so it should be doable and fun.
Since I’m still starting, my February goal is pretty straightforward: I want to read in a book at least 15 minutes a day. I’ve been quite bad with that and I want to establish a consistent habit again, baby steps. I will use the Forest App on my phone and track mindful minutes.
The more I tried to think of what I should make the goal for February… the more I felt like what I actually need is to build up the buffer on my existing goals; I’ve been edge-skating too much lately.
So I’m going to beemind urgency load. Here’s the goal: urgency_load – poisson – beeminder
I’m going to look at the stuff in the thread https://forum.beeminder.com/t/beeminding-urgency-load, and try to cobble together a script using cron tonight. I’ll edit the message when I’ve got it working.
EDIT: Also, I neglected to mention the connection of this to my theme. Kind of the point is that I’d rather move toward a world where I can focus on a couple of goals each day, rather than edge-skating forcing me to split my focus between all of them each night.
This went well! I’ve learned 3 stretching exercises and I do them.
I keep counting “minutes learning exercise” towards the goal. I’m not sure if the current rate will be enough of an encouragement for adding more exercises. We’ll see!
For February, I’d like to give gratitude journalling another go. I recently thought that iOS’s Journalling app could reduce the threshold by much, so I’ll give it another go.
Starting with 0.6/day.
My journaling goal went very well. I’m going to keep it around for now. I’ve been thinking about what to do for February, and I read through y’all’s posts for some inspiration.
I think I’m gonna go with stretching / mobility for February. I had some indecision for a few minutes trying to decide what to measure about mobility, until I remembered that this is just a month-long experiment! (and i’m starting 3 days late in the shortest month of the year…)
So that made it easier to just pick something and try it: 5 minutes a day, do more.
I’m going with “AGI Fridays” for February. I’m resurrecting a mailing list (holler if you want in on it) that I’ve previously used for Science Fridays and then for Thankful Thursdays.
(Ideas for after that: reading, clutter, deep work, email backlog.)
Update: I am through all the “If I miss this I will be truly bummed” videos. There are still quite a few “this looks cool, I should watch it” replays to go through. A couple look like “meh, I could skip this,” but I’m still going to keep them in the goal for now. I figure I’ll start the videos and if after a few minutes they don’t grab me, I’ll mark them as done regardless of if I finish them.
The February bee goal went well: it helped me keep track of weekly feedings, adding boxes, and today I did the first inspection of the year. I expect this goal to keep running until October or so.
I’m also still chugging along on my tasks-done-before-bedtime goal, although it hit some rocky territory when we came back from a trip last week (the problem with how beeminder handles breaks currently is that it treats the breaks as buffer with regards to max safe buffer, which means I tend to come back to aaaaaall my goals red at once). But it’s still accomplishing what I wanted it to, and my evenings are still generally going well as a result. This is by far my most successful “improve bedtime” goal I’ve ever managed!
I set up my new March goal: we are currently looking at moving in the next 6 to 15 months. I have a spreadsheet with a bunch of tasks on it that need to get done at different stages of the process, but I’ve been dragging my feet on actually doing them. My new goal movingtasks – lanthala – beeminder is currently set at a slope of 2 tasks per week, which should get the currently-doable list done by the end of the summer. As the certainty of our timeline increases, I’ll probably be increasing the slope (and the # of items on the list).
Edit: @shanaqui I can’t currently edit my initial list-of-goals post to add the March goal; is this something up with my forum account, or do you know if there’s a global 1-month limit to editing?
I finished all the videos. Several of the lectures came with lists of additional resources that are interesting, but not time sensitive.
I’m still undecided on a March goal, but I have two days to decide still.
January
In February, I continued the January’s goal of regular birding + I did an additional related monthly challenge where you submit at least 31 “complete” checklists per month to enter a giveaway. Well, that was overwhelming, honestly. I am glad for this goal to be archived soon. Will continue just the basic version of the goal where it just nudges me to go without too long breaks.
February
Averaging 7 daily servings of fresh fruit and veggies - done. But this felt like another excessive thing to remember every day but the end of the challenge. Will be stopping the goal now, not returning to the baseline 5-a-day. Okay, I can do this easily, and even if there was some impact from the goal’s existence to push me to eat more of those, the potential negative impact that can be generalized as “don’t try to fix what’s not broken” might be more significant. But it was interesting to look at my consumption numerically, and even if it naturally goes down after I stop tracking, I am sure it will then compensate in summer.
March
For March, I will be trying to make a dent in the TBR of the books I once purchased with this purpose. I made a goal last weekend just to give it a test run and see whether the script is working all right.
March goal decided. I already have a journaling goal that I’ve been doing well with. However, while the quantity of journaling has been good, due to some personal stresses, quality has been not great.
So, to break up the ruminating I want to try some different prompt methods. I have long had a fascination with tarot cards. I have a family member who passed awhile back who was a palm and tarot reader, and I have some books she gave me, and I have a few tarot decks. I don’t believe in any psychic powers or spirits behind it, but since I like the art and symbolism I want to try using a tarot card as a journal prompt 3-4 times a week during March.
Let’s see, I owe a bit of an update here!
This goal’s still trucking along. I’m doing much more than one chore a day at the moment, most days, but it’s keeping me chugging along on the days when I really don’t want to.
This one was more finicky to track than I hoped, and has been archived at the end of the month. I did mostly keep up with it, but it turns out it’s woollier than I thought – how long do I have to put my book down for, for it to count as the end of a session? I tend to read in a very bitty, piecemeal fashion: read a chapter, answer an email, read a chapter, go pet a rabbit, etc.
This one’s pure practicality. At the moment everything’s my job, including the recycling, but normally it’s on my wife’s plate… and it’s something I care more about doing regularly (to keep things tidy) than they do. So I’m going to take it out every other day for now, and when they’re fully mobile again, take it out every other day if they haven’t already.
January: 35 minutes intensity worked fairly well, although it’s got a bit muddled as my smartwatch stopped syncing for a while and is now in the shop. but when it comes back I think I’ll continue.
February: Utterly neglected this one. I’ve been trying to track time spend focusing/in flow using Toggl, but frankly it doesn’t seem compatible with how I work and I’ve cheated on it a few times - or completely lost track of things. I guess I’ll archive it and give the concept some more thought.
March: I’m trying to get better at taking notes while I work, so I’ve added a goal to make two distinct notes on topics I’ve learned during the day. It’s ok, I suppose?
My February goal went well. I had my reading goal to read 15 minutes a day and added reading daily because I not only want to read a certain amount of minutes each week but also establish a daily habit.
I have a lot of things to figure out, so I have to think a lot, and since writing is thinking, my march goal is going to be about writing. The goal: Write at least 200 words every day, I’ll be tracking with the Beeminder plugin for Obsidian.
