New Month's Resolutions 2025

Akrasia
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January: Journaling

This went really well in January, and I let it keep running through February, but I tried moving the deadline time to be more like “do this at bedtime”, but then I derailed it several times because I can’t seem to keep track of any non-5pm beeminder deadlines? So I’m not sure what to do with this one. I do want to keep using the journal and jotting things down on the daily-ish, but the goal is maybe not working as is currently. I guess i can just move the deadline back to 5pm? Or maybe i’ll let it be flat for the next month and see if I just completely fall off the wagon without it?

February: mobility

This has been really nice. Taking just a quick stretching / movement snack throughout the day feels really good. I guess it can keep going in March and we’ll see if it suffers a similar fate to the January journaling, or what!

March: reading

I’m struggling to settle on something, but the thing that’s pulling at me most in the moment is reading things. I started a new novel this month, and I have a couple non-fiction books going in tandem. But maybe I just want to spend time reading things that I want to read? I don’t think I’ve ever done a time-spent-reading goal, so I’m gonna try that.

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My February goal was a pretty major success. It led to me creating this thing:

For March I picked another hobby, math puzzles. I have an unwieldy document I’ve been adding math puzzles to for decades. It has 89 puzzles in it and I’d like to migrate them all to a GitHub repository (one gissue per puzzle) for betting organization. So, voila, here’s my goal for March:

I’m only committing to 1 puzzle migrated every other day. Not because the migration is hard but because each puzzle I revisit risks re-nerd-sniping me.

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Update: I overshot my goal on this one. The book I got turns out to be about Gestalt Tarot, which actually goes along well with how I think about Tarot. Journaling with the cards as I work my way through the book has been useful. I’m definitely going to keep up the practice, even if I’m not going to keep up the Beeminder goal (trying to limit manual entry goals).

Still not sure what to do for my April goal is going to be yet. I have some pressing real world goals I need to work on, but they’re not easy to quantify. Got a few days to mull this over though.

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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.

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April goal decided: I use Tody to track housekeeping, and it has a point system. I’m going to aim for 10 points of housework done per day.

This is where it gets a little fine print: will count any chores that I do, so chores that I have to ask my husband or children to take care of. If they take initiative on their own, it doesn’t count for my point total, but I feel like if I have to ask someone multiple times to please clean the bathroom sink, that is some amount of effort on my part.

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46

My March goal, reading-time was fine in that it gave me an excuse to do a lot of reading, which seems to be a thing with me – it only takes a slight nudge and I go from no reading at all to Lots Of Reading. But tracking reading time was not super useful for me, because of a number of frictions. I rarely remembered to actually start a timer or otherwise note the start time. And deciding how much time to make the goal for, or a max safety days or whatnot was all .. messy. Also it didn’t cause me to spend more time on existing books that I’m slogging my way slowly through. I don’t like reading non-fiction very much. I just blew threw a bunch of fun easy novels. So.

Anyway, randomly, (as in this was not in any of my brainstorming lists for a new-month goal), I’m gonna make a puzzle goal for this month. There’s a jigsaw puzzle that’s been out (under a blanket to protect it from the cats) for months and months now, and I haven’t made much progress, so I’m gonna see if the same thing that worked so well with the reading goal – give myself a nudge, an excuse, permission – will get me to wrap that up.

So here’s my april puzzling goal: apr-puzzle – b – beeminder

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My puzzle migration goal for March has been a success. Makes me think I could use this trick for more sloggy adulting things. In fact, let me try something vaguely similar for April: migrating things languishing in my inbox and email backlog into my task management system (I call it Omnitask and it’s really just a collection of GitHub Issues, or gissues, as I call them).

Et voila: mailgration – d – beeminder

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48

No real updates on January goal, and February goal didn’t work so was archived already.

March: /recycling

This has worked well. It was somewhat messed up by my surprise trip to Wales to be with my grandmother before she died, but my way of handling that was to make sure the recycling was taken out there, too. :person_shrugging: My dad actually took care of that, so it was an easy check-off, but the goal isn’t meant to be a difficult one, and I’m okay with “it got done, so I’m checking it off, even if I wasn’t the one who did it”.

April: /morningreading

Trying another reading goal designed to try to keep me reading. This one’s for reading 5 pages/day as one of the first things I do.

The problem I foresee with this is whether I actually have a book on hand, so it may make sense for the pages I read to be from my Serial Reader installment of the day, thereby checking off two goals at once. That’s absolutely fine. The point is just for the first thing I consume during a day to a) not be a terrible game full of microtransactions (alas, I have been hooked) and b) not be email, work-related, etc.

And five pages should be doable no matter what! I hope!

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January goal is still a very strong winner. It also has a side benefit, or maybe it’s the primary benefit? of letting me see really quickly when I’m not doing so well, productivity (and mental health) wise. Like, I was doing great for a couple weeks after our trip, but this week I’ve struggled with getting everything done by bedtime, and have actually lost ground, net; this is a handy early-warning system to dial things back (which I have done already).

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February bee goal is doing fine; bees are happy. March goal is a bit more on the edge – turns out the things on my list are generally all projects that require multiple steps, sometime over multiple days, so they’re not easy to knock out.

April is going to be a real experiment: I’ve never tracked exercise, but I’d like to increase my “incidental exercise” amount, by doing things like lowering the motor on my ebike, or walking faster, etc. I’ve been tracking this using fitbit’s active zone minutes, with a goal of the standard recommendation of 150 minutes a week. I’m going to keep a careful eye on this because as soon as I started tracking this, I immediately hit the “overtraining” level and I think that has contributed to my current productivity slump. Oops. Depending on how this goes, I may need a companion goal to stop me from doing too much exercise…

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I… never got around to making a March goal. Whoops.

Recall that one of the main thrusts of what I want to do this year is to try to be more focused on doing the important things and less spread out over little things that don’t really matter. So I thought one thing that’d be interesting to try as my April goal is a simple do-more goal to pick a “most important” thing to get done each day, and to get it done that day. I’ll give one point for picking the task, and one for getting it done. I’ll make the weekly slope 10 to start, so it isn’t necessary to always pick something unambitious so I always get it done, but I do need to sometimes get it done even if I assign a task every day.

Of course it’s understood that the tasks on the weekend will be somewhat less ambitious.

I’ll just name this goal frog, as in the thing one eats. Although I’m not exactly sure that this goal will match the spirit of the “eat the frog” advice—it’ll probably often be less something I do first thing in the morning and more something that takes all day to do.

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I’ve been thinking ahead to my May goal, and I’m not sure what to try out. My puzzling goal has gone almost exactly like the reading goal, but with less staying-up-all-night-long. Which has been fun, having that little nudge to do a fun thing, but is also maybe not improving my life in proportion to the amount of time I’m devoting to it? I’m not sure what I’m trying to say.

Anyway, what’s your most surprisingly useful, or life-changing Beeminder goal?

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I had a think about this and I don’t have a pithy answer, because it varies so much. But I can tell you the general category: it’s ones that are specific to me and a problem that I need to solve, something hyper-personal, rather than “general self-improvement”. Sometimes it’s a pretty short-term goal, something for this exact moment, too.

Generally I find that beeminding a small improvement tends to produce outsize results, as well. Like my morning reading goal currently, which only has a rate of 5/day – usually I read more than that, given the prompt to do it in the first place, but when I’m not feeling like it (as inevitably happens), it’s an easy goal for me to meet.

My serialreader goal – or really Serial Reader in general – is a good example of the same principle. Since starting it, I’ve read twenty (and a half) classic books that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have picked up. (OK, some of them are classic mysteries, so maybe I would’ve… but not now.) It’s a goal I managed to keep up pretty much no matter what was going on, and it encouraged me to try some new stuff just because it was there when I needed a new serial. (I should really try feeding one of my own to-be-read books into it, since it can make a serial of anything, and see if breaking some of those up will get me over the hump with starting on them!)

…Sorry, all my examples are about reading, because that tends to be the problem I’m trying to solve, ahaha. But the principle is really just that my best goals are highly personal and highly relevant to the current moment, rather than being aspirational about something I want to have done (but not actively do).

Which is basically related to my feeling that “wanting to have done” something means I don’t really want to do it and quite possibly shouldn’t, at least for now. Only when I can formulate something into “I want to do it now” do I tend to act on anything. I want to have worked meditation practices into my daily life, but I don’t want to do it now. So it’s not a goal for this moment.

Previously I wanted to have moved house, but didn’t want to be doing that right now, so goals aligned with moving didn’t seem right. I actively want to move house now, so possibly my May goal should be doing something toward that…

Sorry, I’m probably beginning to ramble!

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January :fast_forward_button: birding checklists goal - going well
February :white_check_mark:
March :fast_forward_button: I have broadened the scope of this goal that counts total pages on my TBR list, which grows exponentially as the book gets “older” since obtaining - now it includes not only bought books but all titles somehow obtained (e.g. ARCs, scans from libraries) and it’s been going really well since then.
April :cross_mark: writing up parts of my research is the hardest element of the entire process, and this goal failed massively. Yes, I have been putting some words into the Word doc, but it’s still very far from the desired result. I also messed the graph badly by not tweaking the date-value-rate relation before adding the vacation week break and weekends-off, so by the last week of the months it’s just looking absolutely horribly and counter-productive. I decided to “uncle” derail yesterday and finish the goal and try something different to the same end in May instead :down_arrow:, starting a bit early (hence the entire earlier-than-usual update)
May: I now have two manuscripts with real-life deadlines coming up soon-ish, so I will be tracking the number of pomodoros dedicated to just writing. Looking at secondary literature only counts if I am searching for a specific quote! (I tend to believe I always need to read around more.) I will need to stil re-read one large primary text for the second manuscript, so that would count. The rate will be 6 a day, and I am doing 25/5 pomodoros with Intend.do - so it’s 3 hours daily (the remaining time can go to “reading around”). Weekends off, and I will do 3 remaining work days of April with half the rate because of other urgent errands.

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Definitely my meta goal, as it allows me to make sure I am doing enough for each of the small things I beemind over time but not get overwhelmed every single day by having to do everything.

On the actual actionable goals, I definitely agree with @shanaqui that it’s always something extremely specific to the current moment in my life that is most useful. E.g. I would forget to apply oil to my cuticles in winter, then I revived an old goal for that - and voila, less-than-a-minute action and such a help to the condition of my hands in the cold weather. Feels like magic.

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I’ve gone through a few different iterations of it, but my dental care goal(s) have been so useful. Dental care was a problem for most of my life and a great source of anxiety and shame for me. That is no longer the case. Two asides to this:

  1. Even after having this goal and staying on track with it for years, I still need reminders to brush and floss, and this was frustrating and upsetting to me. This spurred a little digging, and apparently this is not uncommon for those of us with ADHD. Habit formation in general can be hard for us. We can do something daily for whatever magical number of days is supposed to make it stick, and then just forget the next day and never do it again and never think about it again. It’s just how my brain works and there’s no point beating myself up trying to fight against my neurology when I can just set a reminder on my phone. And so many self-help concepts use “like brushing your teeth” as their example of a habit that everyone is just supposed to have. This used to be a source of shame for me, but now I take it as a sign, that maybe whatever advice isn’t going to be useful for me and that’s ok.

  2. My latest dance project is a chair balancing act. Specifically, balancing the chair in my teeth. This dance project has brought me so much joy. It’s pushed the boundaries of my abilities, it’s added a whole new dimension to what I can do as a performer, and it’s led to spin off goals like needing to improve my leg strength and flexibility in my feet and ankles. There is no way I could have done this back when my teeth were always hurting and wiggling loose.

So yeah, dental goal, hands down, the weirdest improvements to my life.

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I’m with @shanaqui. I would say the life-changing-ness is in the aggregate of so many little things. Like having done 160,000 pushups over the years (:exploding_head:). Or diligently reading Toby Ord’s The Precipice cover to cover. Lately I’ve gotten so much mileage out of freshening goals and migrating backlogs of things into a collection of GitHub issues.

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Anyway, what’s your most surprisingly useful, or life-changing Beeminder goal?

Beeminding my thesis was really successful, but in all honesty I probably would have gotten it done by the deadline, if not quite as smoothly. Dental beeminding, like @cthulhucultist , has been both effective and probably saved me the most money, since teeth are shockingly expensive to replace. My current bedtime goal has been working really well, and if it continues to hold up, may take the prize. My various time-spent-at-paid-work goals over the years have also been really impactful, both because they helped push me through times when I was very much not feeling motivated, and because they gave me a visual indicator of what “enough” looked like, so at the end of the day I could say “yep I did enough” and go off and live the rest of my life.

But I think the biggest impact from a single goal has to be the most boring, conventional example of Beeminder usage ever: InboxZero (actually, in my case, InboxTen but same idea). Knowing that I will be able to handle my email and not lose anything in the influx has honestly been huge, and I know for a fact i wouldn’t be able to maintain it without the goal because every time I put the goal on break, my inbox balloons to ridiculous proportions. I started it in 2017, as a whittle-down goal from 128 emails, and it’s been a vital part of my beeminder repertoire since.

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Update: the Tody goal has been quite useful. The “guest facing” areas of my house in particular look significantly better. That said, I have some tasks I just keep skipping over while still staying just above the goal minimum. I think I’m going to let this specific goal wind down and retool a new Tody related goal.

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May is (almost) here! And this month I’m going to try something that I may actually not succeed at: a fruits&vegetables goal. I don’t generally put much thought into what I eat, but I’ve been noticing that lately my veggie intake has been embarrassingly low. I like fruits and vegetables just fine, it’s more a matter of not having them on hand or not wanting to bother cooking them.

So I’m going with the most basic of goals, “Eat N servings of fruits and veggies per day”. I’m starting with N=1 because right now that would be a significant improvement (like I said, embarrassingly low). I’m hoping that I’ll be able to raise that to 2 fairly soon, and ideally I would like it to be set at 3. I’m defining a serving as approximately a cup, and am not going to lose any sleep being too picky about that; so an apple is a serving, even though some apples are smaller than a cup, etc etc. Also don’t care about what form the fruit or veg is in, as long as it still contains the solids: smoothies count, veggie chips count, spinach quiche counts if I eat enough of it, juice does not. The bag of “greens powder” I bought totally counts, because I firmly believe in better living through chemistry. And I’m using a culinary definition of fruits and vegetables, rather than a botanical one, so potatoes don’t count (but sweet potatoes do).

As for last month’s goal, of “active zone minutes”, turns out I hit 150 active minutes a week even when sick and napping most of the day. Thanks, biking as primary mode of transportation! I’m going to keep the goal for now, because it’s nice to have the data tracking in an easy-to-get-to place, and maybe consider upping the challenge once I finally beat this 3-week strep infection.

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May goal: This is something of a continuation of my March. I have a book about Gestalt Tarot, and that is the method I use in my practice. But, part of what I like about the art in tarot cards is the symbolism in them, and would like to be more familiar with that symbolism. I have a couple decks in Anki of basic tarot symbolism using the Rider Waite Smith deck, which is one of the more popular decks and one I use and am familiar with (albeit not my favorite). So, I have a goal set up right now to review 50 cards per day. I’m sure that as the month goes on and I get more familiar with the cards I’ll have less reviews available and have to tweak that number, but this feel like a good number to start with.

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