Thank you! I’ve set up a script to auto submit on spreadsheet update so I think I’m all set for now.
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January 
This went well! I will need to replenish soon if I want to continue, and it looks like it makes sense to - I feel like my immunity has improved a bit, and (together with figuring and eliminating some environmental factors) I was able to get over a chronic cough that bothered me over recent few months. (Not medical advice, but the correlation seems to have been widely established in authoritative sources.)
For February, I am choosing the goal that I started a few days ago to try out the setup: tbr_started_whittle. The background is that I tend to start many books at once and unless I am pushed to finish by a deadline (ARC publication date or library due date) I tend to get excited to start something else, and keep multiple books in the limbo of “I would like to finish this one day, no reason not to be planning so…” So, this goal gets the sum of percentages of the unread portions in all my books that have been started (past 15%), and I am planning to be actively reducing this total (which started at 9 full books - consisting of multiple partially read, of course) down to 5 by the end of February and then keeping it under the flat line of 5.
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Flossing is still doing its work well (and got acknowledged as helping others too 
).
For February, I’m adding one small, focused experiment.
Context: I may be at risk of elevated blood pressure. A bit surprising given my lifestyle, less so given family history. I’ll see my GP soon, but I already want to start testing a single, low-risk lever that should not have any downside (which I’ll check with my GP).
Apparently a breath exercise could help with my blood pressure profile, let’s see 
Details:
- ~6 breaths/min
- longer exhale than inhale
- start with 5 minutes/day
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January: my spendless goal to cut down on frivolous spending was a tentative success: I did derail once (I saw a fancy candle I couldn’t resist…) but it prevented me from letting that turn into a spending spree, and I was generally much more aware and thoughtful about how I was using money. Not frittering money away on random impulse purchases meant that I had enough spare to buy tickets to see my favourite band the Mountain Goats in October!
Looking forward to February: this is a very trivial kind of goal but it’s also the sort of thing I think beeminder is perfect for. I want to whittle down my tumblr likes (1000+). I’ve been using them as a sort of dumping ground/bookmark zone and I want to actually sort through them, reblog what is reblog-worthy, read the things I saved to read later, and sort everything else into a place it belongs. At a rate of -42 a day I should have no likes left by the end of February!
If it goes well, I might do a similar thing for my youtube likes in the future…
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Januaryedesserts was a pretty good goal. I did not derail and it was even more motivating than I anticipated–I definitely ate fewer than 62 desserts in January.
For a while I thought it was going great and I would just have to change the name to desserts and keep it going, but I realized that sometimes I would eat something that wasn’t exactly what I wanted in order to feel like I was getting the most out of my dessert point. I may have to ponder that. Or maybe I’ll just remember how infrequently I felt sick and unhappy from mindlessly munching and it will have a long-lasting effect that way.
For February, I’m finally trying out a Time Stream goal! Write will get a datapoint every time I complete the writing session in my weekday morning routine, rather than running out of time and having to skip it. I definitely hope for this one to continue so I’m not giving it a monthly name! My goal is three times a week.
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January: /checkmail
This has proven useful. We’re getting a bit less junk mail for the previous occupant by now, so it’s also a bit less overwhelming in general, but I think we can still use the ongoing reminder to sort incoming mail (it’ll help when I get back to doing Postcrossing more regularly, for example).
I’ll be continuing the goal for now.
February: /postcrossing
My first thought for February was some kind of goal to get me out of the house, because I’ve been keeping indoors a lot – partly because I’m really really tired this last week because of the physio but that’s just an excuse really, because the trend had definitely started before that. I also thought about maybe adding an indoor exercise goal for using the resistance bands I had to get for physio… but I think my physio is enough of that for now.
And then in typing this post I mentioned Postcrossing, and remembered that I’ve thought on and off about adding a Postcrossing goal for the last year or more… and that having a card to post is definitely something that pushes me to get out of the house, while being possible to work around if I’m really exhausted (i.e. just wait a day or two extra, or ask Lisa to post it).
So, February’s goal is ostensibly for Postcrossing participation, but I think it will also have the side effect of getting me out of the house more, and I’ll report on both outcomes when I come to post about it in March.
Rate is tricky to figure out. It probably can’t be daily, or even every week day, because I can only send 18 postcards at a time; technically I could get through most of February without hitting a problem (20 weekdays), and likely some cards would arrive in the meantime, but it probably wouldn’t be sustainable longterm if I decided to keep the goal.
I think I’ll go with about 3/week, so 3/7 per day, and see how that goes. I’ll start with a few days of flat spot because I’m not sure if I can make current postage with the stamps I have, and may need to order more.
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January: meals
The aim of this goal was to eat healthier meals, more mindfully, and in that respect it was a huge success. It was hard to get dialed in at first and I derailed when I procrastinated on putting in data one day. I’m excited to see what happens with this one and am going to continue it.
February: joy
The aim of this goal is to feel more joyful. I started this already and have detailed, which makes me think maybe I should lower the slope. It’s basically doing a joy micro habit every day.
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January was a low-profile but solid win; I ate my (new bottle of) vitamin C every day.
For Feb, I was tempted by @shanaqui ‘s Postcrossing goal – I’ve been wanting to try Postcrossing for a while (I have SO many postcards). But instead I’m going with a very practical goal – Slack recently started actually wiping the long-term history of free instances (instead of keeping everything available through the API), so I want to be more reliable about downloading my Slack’s history every month. slacksave – lanthala – beeminder This is also going to be a pretty easy goal, but the more regular things I can outsource to beeminder, the fewer things I have to keep track of myself.
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January was a win on the graph, but not so much on the ground. I was able to get enough Tody points to stay ahead of my goal, but there were a lot of nights where it got late and I started just cleaning whatever was nearby so that I could get the points I needed, but I’m still ignoring big, daunting household tasks. Is the house cleaner? Yes. Is this a good, sustainable way to keep it clean? No. I’m probably going to try different iterations of this goal down the line to see if there’s something that I can make stick.
For February, I am going to try to hold myself to averaging 20 minutes or less on the big three of internet distractions for me (reddit, Facebook, and Instagram). All three of these are sites that are useful for me in short bursts, but they are a major source of distraction and time loss if I stick around.
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I think my January goal (poisson/mealplan) has been a success. Of course, I’ve actually done the thing. I think it’s indeed helped match my grocery purchased to my goals for protein/fiber intake, but also to match it a bit better to the amount I’m actually cooking/eating.
February, February, February… As mentioned in the gratitude journal thread, I just reread HPMOR. Among other things, this made me think about LessWrong, and the old hammertime club we did in the forums here a few years ago. Absolutely none of those habits stuck. So maybe this is unwise, but I’m going to reopen poisson/hammertime, and try to go through it again, at a rate of a few posts a week.
Of course, this goal is by its nature transient—if I don’t derail, I’ll get through the whole thing in about two months. But that’s fine.
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My Tody goal is a simple “Tody zero” – end of the day, have I zeroed out my tasks? Sometimes if I get really behind I reset by doing some strategic pauses to even out the tasks a bit, but once I’m on top of it, aiming to get everything done in the day it becomes due works really well for me. (Well, me and my wife – technically they’re responsible for some of the tasks.)
Offering that thought in case it’s useful!
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Join usss… 
[Disclaimer I should’ve maybe said before: I am of course also one of Postcrossing’s team. Here I am just posting as a Postcrossing member/fan though!]
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That’s a good thought. I do also need to go through and rework how some of the chores are set up in Tody, so a combination of those two ideas might be a future monthly goal.
February goal is going really well. I use Oasis Launcher on my phone and I set it up to interrupt me before I go to one of my distracting website/apps. It seems to have completely knocked me out of the habit, at least for now. Since I’m well under the line for this goal, I’ve decided to go ahead and start my March goal. Al Raqs online conference happened back in January, and once again, I couldn’t watch most of it in real time. The replays will be online until March 26th, so I’ve set a goal to get through them all before the deadline.
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My February goal to sort through all my tumblr likes was a grand success! It was actually really soothing and meditative to go on a journey through my interests of the last few years, enjoying fan art, laughing at memes, pondering over short stories, and finally checking out all those recommendations that I told myself I was going to get round to some day. My likes are down to 0 and I feel refreshed!
For March I’ve decided I want to incorporate some lowkey studying for the Kanji Kentei into my routine (I’m not sure I’ll ever take the actual exam, but I thought it would be fun to study for it anyway). I vacillated a lot over how best to beemind this: because it’s going to be a combination of workbooks and anki, I initially thought time tracking would be a good way to do it, but I felt resistance at the idea of having another daily number to track and log. So I’ve kept it super simple, and it’s just “touches”: touch some study material, 6 times a week. Here’s the goal: kanken.
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February: bp-slowbreathing
February’s experiment: bp-slowbreathing held up well. I did it consistently, mostly as a “5 minutes rest before measurement” rule to get valid blood pressure readings.
No visible effect on blood pressure, but that’s not very surprising for such a simple intervention in such a short window.
More importantly: my GP reassured me. Apparently, what Apple Health flags as “elevated” (reportedly following European guidelines) is well within normal range by my GP’s standards. I’ll stop the daily monitoring.
The goal stays, but I’m scaling back to 2.5 min/day I’ve found I actually like the exercise itself, it’s a low-friction “no-phone break” I can take anywhere.
March: grocery-free-days
For March, I’m adding a new goal that may help me reduce my grocery spending.
I live <100m from a large supermarket, which means I have zero friction incentive to plan ahead. I just pop in whenever. In 2025, this added up to >200 visits to the supermarket at €15/visit.
I think it’s reasonable that I’m paying €1-1.5 extra per visit due to impulse purchases. So I expect I can cut grocery spending by ~5-10% with no real loss, just by having more grocery-store-free days per month.
Is this the best place to save money?
I’m already living on a pretty small budget compared to my income. I like things the way they are. I formulate my main goal as saving money to make it measurable, but I’ll also be eating less unhealthy stuff this way.
Side story about why making use of discounts is crucial for grocery spending in the Netherlands
Dutch supermarkets are notably more expensive than their German and Belgian counterparts. The reason appears to be the discount oriented pricing strategies. Dutch supermarkets compete heavily on promotions rather than structural low prices. We’re basically overpaying for regular unit prices. There’s institutional consensus that this is suboptimal for consumers. One chain (Jumbo) tried to side with the consumers, by committing to structurally lower prices across the board. They couldn’t sustain it and had to give up after… a year or two, I think. The market decided that we stick with a suboptimal situation.
First step: track days I don’t go to the grocery store. Manual entry for now; if it sticks, I could automate via YNAB.
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February: /postcrossing
This went pretty well. I didn’t always go out and post the postcard myself, but it kept the idea of going outside for a walk in my head, and I did generally go for 2-3 walks a week in February in consequence. Plus, yay, back to participating in Postcrossing properly! No postcards yet, as I had more received than sent, though.
March: /magazines
I’m subscribed to a couple of magazines (New Scientist, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books) via Libby, and I never get round to them. This goal is intending to make sure I do. I wish they were available on my Kobo, but since they’re not, first step is to charge my Onyx Boox ereader…
The rate is 2 magazines/week, since New Scientist is weekly and the other two are biweekly.
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@shanaqui I love new scientist! I’ve been getting the paper subscription for the past few months and like it even more than the monthly Scientific American.
February: joy
The aim of this goal was to feel more joyful, but I found it hard to keep track of every day and not making a huge difference. I derailed on this a few times and ended up archiving it.
March: walks
The aim of this goal is to get out and walk during the work day so I feel less tired at the end of the day. My ultimate goal is to do 2-3 walks a day, but because I’m super busy right now I’m keeping at the low 2 walks per week to hopefully have it be pretty manageable.
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February: newmonthresolution – lanthala – beeminder
Unsurprisingly, a once-a-month goal is going fine after the first month 
But it’s nice to have yet another sporadic chore off my mind and onto beeminder.
March: workhours – lanthala – beeminder
I’m starting a new consulting gig, which the company wants to turn into something long-term. Right now, though, it’s still pretty ad-hoc, which makes a time-based goal (my best strategy historically) tricky. I’m going to recreate my highly-successful work-hours goal, but with the explicit intention of using dummy hours to fill in when I don’t have assigned tasks. The good news is this can be an autodata goal (yay, toggl!)
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January
February’s goal to whittle down the number of started and unfinished books went well, despite the general overwhelm around some other aspects of my reading plans and musts. The sum of unread portions of started books had gone down from 9 to under 4 (equivalents of full books). The goal will continue as a flat line at the level of 5.
For March, I want to combine, again, the wish for something not overwhelming, on the one hand, and a need that was identified a few days ago, on the other hand, and make a goal for regularly applying lip balm. Specifically, before going to sleep, because that’s where I forget it most often and where it would be most useful, as I seem to be drinking tea non-stop at all other times of the day 
Here it is: lipbalm_b4_sleep
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