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.