I want to join for this month. I used to be a huge book lover, but I find myself returning books to the library without touching them. Also, it has been ages since I read Harry Potter. I want to honor the memory of my grandmother, who read exactly the copies I’m about to read now. I don’t know if I’ll have to up the steepness of the graph, but as for now:
/read
January 
February 
March April 
May June
July goal is running well, helps me prioritize parts of my project that are most urgent. Most recent discovered lifehack: when I outlined what counts, I stipulated that “reading around” certain topic will only count in July - because I objectively needed to read secondary lit, but limiting it in time was very helpful: now I am ready-ish to move on to the stages where I produce knowledge.
For August, I decided to try a goal to check work email. Since my mail app stopped working, it requires jumping through hoops more then earlier, so I have been reluctant to. 0.88/day, weekends-off.
I retroactively added things I beeminded in June and July (reading books, in particular one that a friend gave me about the Israel Hamas war, and another freshening goal for migrating and curating notes for my AI newsletter).
For August, Bee and I are coordinating on a new data collection dashboard we’re calling “cortex” which we intend to be a streamlined place to gather Quantified Self data, maybe both pulling from and pushing to Beeminder. Not sure how much of that is pie in the sky but at the very least we’ll beemind collecting more QS data. We’ve been talking about protein and Macrofactor lately. Plus biking.
Ok, July went better than June, and I’m feeling about 30% more functional, so I’m going to try a new goal this month and see if I can manage to keep it. I’m going to be traveling for three weeks out of the month, too, so this goal needs to play well with that.
I’ve been having a lot of cramps since last fall, and for some reason, walking seems to be correlated with less cramps at bedtime (when it’s most disruptive). Not any other exercise, just walking. So I’m going to make a basic “steps walked” goal and see how that goes. Looking back at my fitbit data, June I only walked 3-4k steps a day, but July (which is when things improved) I was walking nearly 6k steps on average. Then I had to travel to a funeral last week, which involved very little walking, and my cramps came back. So I’m going to aim for 5k steps a day, and see if that improves things. Since it’ll be an autodata goal, I’m going to experiment with leaving it on while I’m traveling (normally I set all my goals to 0 while on trips, because I can’t reliably check beeminder while traveling) and I’ll make sure I give myself a generous buffer if I derail. I tend to get a lot of steps on trips, so hopefully this will work out even though the time zones will be very confusing.
Ah, I seem to have missed a couple months. Life has been crazy.
I decided to archive my May goal ( amnesia – poisson – beeminder , “how late in the morning I go before touching anything that isn’t work”, basically). The idea was nice but the all-or-nothing nature is just too annoying.
Everything else is kind of going reasonably well.
Yet again, I think I would like to try to nudge myself to adopt a GTD-like system for organizing things I need to get done. I’ll figure out exactly what the goal should be over the next couple of days… will probably either be a goal for weekly reviews or clearing the inbox, in the GTD sense.
January February March April May June July
August The goal for checking whether there is anything in my work mailbox that needs attention on most workdays has been working great. I mean, I no longer find myself panicking that I have forgotten to look and maybe someone is expecting something from me. (I mean, everything substantial goes to my personal mailbox, so the entire situation is not as weird as it sounds.) Will keep for now.
For September, I will be doing limit-arcs. I have recently found myself often not enjoying some ARCs as much as I would like but feeling like I must finish them if they are not awful enough to angrily DNF because those were given to me specifically to review. I also have quite a few lined up for the next several months now. But I still often grab something “shiny, new!” just because they are available, without properly thinking whether I can fit that into my reading plans. So this goal is to limit the number of new ARCs I would add to my list over the entire month to just two. It’s set up in a way that I can get the first one as soon as Sep 1 and the second one as early as the mid of the month, but it never reaches the third. (If I got the do-less setup correctly; I haven’t been doing those for a while.)
UPD: I should probably clarify one caveat that I meant from the beginning but didn’t think will matter to spell it out. The idea is to limit the number of ARCs that I request (or click to “read now” if they are open to everyone). I thought about this because a few weeks ago I received my first ever widget at NetGalley (a widget is an invitation to review a specific title that the publisher thinks fits my reviewer profile, while others should request it). But didn’t think I am likely to receive more to have to spell this out. And, obviously, if I get approved on those that I have requested previously, this also doesn’t count toward this new goal, as they are already counted toward all of my other TBR-related goals, even though it’s still iffy whether I’ll get them. These were the caveats that I was thinking but didn’t spell out. What I didn’t know is that I would be given two more widgets over just 5 days since creating this new goal. Of course, I am looking at those invitations critically and not just accepting blindly, but these acts of accepting widgets do not count toward the goal, as the goal is to limit a rather specific behaviour of browsing through the catalog and “wanting” all of those.
This worked well! I think I’d like to be a little more consistent in getting some time on my recliner every day instead of lots on some days and not on others, but I’m content it’s an option I remember and turn to in order to get some chill time. A habit is slowly being established.
Once more back to the problem of getting to bed on time! One thing that delays me at bedtime is waiting until the last moment to set up my to-do list and write my daily Dreamwidth post. Well, I don’t want to make the latter a Beeminder goal, because I don’t want to do it until near the end of the day, and I’m not supposed to be looking at Beeminder at that time. But I could set up my to-do list at the end of the workday! So that’s the plan this month. It’s set to 5/7 per day, so it doesn’t need done on weekends; I guess it means that on Friday night I need to set up for Monday, but that’s doable.
August was a solid month. Had a blast doodling with the kids or solo. Especially, I started drawing bunnies on stuff. I’d leave notes for people with a cute bunny at the bottom and a speech bubble so it looked like the bunny was saying it. Gets a good laugh out of me, and most people seem to think it’s funny too.
For September, not so fun stuff. The last week of September, the office is pretty empty, so I’m planning to take some paperwork over there to archive. I think I’ve got about 922 loads’ worth of paperwork at home that’s sorted by date and ready to go, but the final organizing part is pretty boring and something I tend to procrastinate on. My plan is to get all those 922 loads packed up so I can get them out of my house by the end of the month. Of course, more loads will come in as I do this, but hopefully not as many as I put away, so I can free up some space in my office.
August has been a blast with reading all Harry Potter books. I’ll have some more fun with it, but then with writing.
Ok, my August step goal went really well with travel – I got 10-20k steps every day, and not a single cramp! Unfortunately now that I’m home I’m trying to figure out how to actually fit walking in my regular daily schedule (6k steps actually takes a lot of time, given I don’t work outside the home so I don’t have a lot of justification to walk around large buildings or anything).
Given that, and also the fact that I lost all my life-progress momentum post-trip, I actually think I’m going to do a short-term doc goal for September. In the past I’ve had really good luck with a URLminder “have to put X words in a doc on a given topic” goal for nebulous, not-easily-quantifiable things I want to do (buy a house, get a job, volunteer, etc). So my doc will be on the topic of troubleshooting and improving my systems, which have been sorely neglected in 2025, and I’ll aim for 25 words a day to start (usually I find any number of words is enough to make me touch the doc, which is enough to make progress). Most notably, unlike most of my goals, I’m not starting with a flat spot – I want to actually be forced to work on this one asap.
January February March April May June July August
September - a do-less goal for new requested ARCs worked well. I didn’t actually request anything for most of the month, but it’s hard to say whether it’s thanks to the goal or I was just feeling overwhelmed with the number of things in my TBR of other origins / not having time to read much because of the road trip. (But earlier it didn’t stop me from requesting and being even more overwhelmed.) A few days ago, I even looked at this all: why am I not requesting anything at all, I have these two slots available, so I requested one picturebook and am thinking of one more book to request. I want to let this goal end for now, to see if there will be any lingering effect from this intervention.
For October, I am starting a trial run for what I might make the next year’s challenge. It is to read more books from countries from which I haven’t really read anything. But that demands depending on translations (unless I want the selection to be skewed to the Anglophone world) and going outside of the genres I read normally, so I decided to do this trial run to see if this makes sense at all. tbr_world - 10 pages / day, based on the fact that I want to read one book from this category a month, and for a preliminary selection of books the average length was ~300.
September goal was mostly a success. I was able to get all the paperwork packed up and in the back of my van, where it sat for a week. I just got it to the office in time to be done with this goal.
For October, I want to go back to something else I enjoy, that makes me feel good when I do it, but for some reason I never do it: Sudoku. I have a whole book of them that my sister got me. I aim to do 4 or 5 per week.
This seems to be helping a bit? It also helps that I’m not making a complicated list with expected completion times, just a simple list, so that’s had an effect too.
I keep being all last-minute about taking my esomeprazole and supplements, so I need to inch that earlier (not all at once, it’s supposed to be a take-it-at-the-same-time-every-day sort of thing). For now, let’s start with before midnight. It’s a rate of 1/day, every day.
My September goal was a success! As expected, having to put some words down meant that I thought about my systems and how I’m handling or not handling them, and also I got 4 words every day I actually made a daily to-do list so that was motivational. I can tell it helped because, while at the beginning of the month I had a lot of entries like “made list but didn’t do anything on it”, by midway through the month I was actually getting things done and managing to keep up with beeminder. And for the last couple of weeks, I’ve actually been accumulating buffer on my “get beeminder goals all done before bedtime” goal, which is honestly my current best measure of how well I’m functioning.
For October, I’m going back to trying to get more steps – I have a chronic pain issue that can be partially managed by walking a lot, but even with a treadmill in the living room I find myself just. Not. I also have found myself reading significantly more fanfic than I would like to, to the point where it’s interfering with other things I’d like to do. I’m going to try temptation bundling: I can read as much fanfic as I want as long as I’m either walking, or away from home: walking_bundle – lanthala – beeminder I’m setting it up as manual data for now, because autodata I think will be too complicated for a goal I’m not sure will work.
October goal in the books. I’ve done enough Sudoku puzzles to meet my goal for the month. It’s been fun and a good way to get myself off my phone in the evenings.
For November: Random tasks.
I use Complice/Intend daily. I use the philosophy of putting in a bunch of intentions every day, like a productivity/self-improvement wish list. And, I do this with the knowledge that I’m not going to get to everything, and that’s ok. This mostly works for me, but it has the down side that sometimes I end up looking at this long list and having no idea what to do next. Here’s the thing: Complice has a button that will pull a random task for you, I just never think to use it in those moments. So, in an effort to train myself to use that button instead of getting task paralysis, I am going to aim to use the get random button an average of once per day.
January 
February 
March April 
May June July August
Re: September
Just reporting back on this hypothesis (about me learning not to request too many ARCs from having this do-less goal a month): there wasn’t any lingering effect from this intervention.
October : The goal was a trial run of a potential 15-month challenge where I read books from countries I haven’t read anything (relatively contemporary). Over this month, I DNF’d (“did not finish” - a status of book review, for those outside the bookish community) two books: one in the English translation from Chinese, one in the Ukrainian translation from Danish. Okay, the first one was a collection of loosely related short stories, so I pretended it’s more of “I have read a few to get an impression”; the second was a novel that I decided to DNF @ 55%. Why? I thought that having a challenge is not a sufficient reason to go on with something I am not making enough sense of / enjoying enough compared to other things on my TBR. With the first book, it was the case that I believe the work is stylistically very sophisticated in the original, so the translator can be doing a great job but things will be lost for those readers who can’t understand the allusions to Chinese tradition. (Okay, they will always be lost, but the question is whether they are central enough for any satisfactory experience of the text.) In the second case, it was a general lack of satisfaction with storytelling. And these are interesting observations, which I don’t know yet if they are definitive for a challenge like this. I think I will keep it at least for the next two months, though not sure about the entire year yet.
For November, I will be keeping track of the amount of protein I consume. I have started actually tracking this a few days ago, so now I have developed some strategies of what to add to my nutrition to actually get enough. Might be tricky, as I have two week-long work-related trips planned, but will see. Tracking done with cronometer website, from where I just manually report the protein amount to beeminder. Set to 66 g/day, basing on the recommendations of 1.2*body weight in kg.
This has worked well and I’m keeping it; I only missed taking medication/supplements on time on one day.
I was a bit stumped for something for this month, so I ended up making a 5/day goal for participating in hunting S ranks in FFXIV. It won’t make a huge dent in the achievement goal I have, but at least it’ll be some progress happening in a sustainable manner behind the scenes. If there’s downtime for S ranks (e.g. around server restarts, which reset all the spawn timers) I might put a break in to help manage that, though if I travel between data centres fairly freely, I should be able to pre-load a few days’ worth of progress when I know there’s S rank downtime coming up.
Well, my October temptation bundling was a bust. The biggest issue was tracking: turns out I’m not really capable of paying attention to what my body is doing while I’m reading, and I would start out walking and then look up at some point to find I was sitting on the couch. Also, it turns out that spending too much time upright in a row is just as bad for my back as too much time sitting, and again, managing the timing of walking and sitting while also reading is beyond my ability to function. I did, however, get into a habit of taking at least one walk outside while reading, which helped my step count, so hopefully I can keep that habit while archiving the goal.
This month, I’m making another “goal google doc”, this one for considering homeschooling my daughter next year: homeschooling – lanthala – beeminder Given my success with google doc minding, I expect this to be an easy win.