Ok, I’m a bit late, but I’m still going to try to start a March goal (January & February are still going strong).
I’m just going to try making a goal to practice piano. It’s actually not really the best month for this since I’m traveling a bit, but I’ll start with a really small slope and build up a bit of buffer first.
I’m super behind on this forum, but my February writing goal has been quite successful and has earned its place on my dashboard.
For March I set up a screen time goal. Pretty straightforward, I check my screen time in iOS Settings every night anyway to put into Exist, so I’m adding it to the Beeminder goal at the same time. My limit is 4 hours which seems to be nice and comfortable. I have to consider whether to decrease it to push myself to have less phone time. I’m not sure it’s worth the bother.
Done with all the Al Raqs videos, and just in time. Since I wrapped that goal up, I am going to go ahead and set up my April goal, and it’s another dance-related one. I have two big, demanding shows coming up, one in the middle of April and one in mid-May. I’ve set up a goal tied to Intend for dance-related outcomes. I’m going to have to adjust the goal as we go as shows come and go but hopefully I can use it to keep my practice schedule on track.
My kanken goal to study kanji 6x/week went well, and I’m going to continue with it for as long as it feels fun and meaningful!
For April I was inspired by @shanaqui mentioning postcrossing before, and then I happened to have an irl friend tell me that she does it too, so I decided I want to try it out too! I’ve spent the last part of March gathering postcards and stamps so I should be ready to request my first address to send a card on the 1st Aprl. I just set the goal for one per week to try it out: and I decided that if for some reason I have the beeminder goal due before I’m able to request another address, then I will send a postcard to a friend instead, and that will count.
This fell by the wayside a bit toward the end of the month due to my graduation trip, but I hope to continue with it! If I could just catch up with everything that would be swell…!
I am (notoriously, I think, by now) bad at work-life separation and boundaries. So bad. I used to have a lunch break at a set time, but somehow it got swallowed. I think it should come back! So I’ve set up a goal with a rate of 1/day and weekends off.
March: walks
The aim of this goal was to get out and walk during the work day so I feel less tired at the end of the day. I’d say this goal was super successful. I ended up settling on a rate of about 1 per day and it never felt stressful, but I definitely felt less tired at end of day.
April: hackeysack
It’s spring! That means spending time outside, and one way to get outside during the day is to spend a few minutes playing hackey sack.
March: my workhours – lanthala – beeminder goal has been going great; after the first week (when I had a major deliverable) I dropped it down to a half hour a day (including weekends) and that’s definitely a comfortable amount currently. I’ll have to keep an eye on it going forward though, as my work demands change.
April: I like a clean desk, but as we all know, empty horizontal surfaces accumulate clutter like cat hair on velvet. I’d like to push myself to clear off everything unnecessary pretty frequently, with the hope that I can keep it mostly open. For now, I’m going to state that it’s a 5 minute goal – I spend 5 minutes cleaning off my desk, and then I’m done, even if the desk isn’t clear. That way the current piles of god only knows what won’t be overwhelming, and also maybe once the obvious junk is put away, I’ll spend that time decluttering instead.
I had 11 days with grocery store visits in March.
I reduced the grocery store visit rate itself, against 2025 average of ~17 visits/month. Due to reasons about my daily rhythm in 2025, which discount the 2025 rate effectively, it doesn’t feel like much of a reduction.
My spending went up by 35%, but that’s an outlier for known reasons (bulk purchases to benefit from some steep discounts + paying groceries for two since this month).
I did like having this top of my mind. I did for instance cycle once to a grocery store that seems to be 5-15% cheaper at a 10-12 minutes distance.
The primary difficulty was data entry. Automating this has become trivial with LLMs, so I’m not worried about it.
All in all, I’m happy with this. I’m keeping it as manual data entry for April. I bumped the rate from 1/2 (days without visits / day) to 4/7. Still manual entry.
I’ve started two goals for April.
Pushups is obvious.
“Office sweets free” is since we have a lot of unhealthy sweets that I really like at seemingly unlimited quantities. I used to have these maybe once every 6-8 weeks, now it’s more like 6-8 servings a week. I tried to limit it by more primitive means, it didn’t work. I need Beeminder.
Oh, shoot, I’m real late on April.
January goal (poisson/mealplan) is still going great.
February goal (to go through hammertime again) is a mixed bag. I’m doing it, and will finish soon enough… and certainly I’ve made a couple reasonably substantial changes in my behaviour as a result (which I may write a separate post about later).
March goal: Despite the small slope and all the travel, the piano goal has been a useful prod to practice. I’ve made quite good progress on the piece I’m learning, and definitely it’s in the good place for a hobby goal where it prods me to do the thing but then once I start I enjoy doing the thing.
For April: I’m not sure if this should really count, but I’ve effectively restarted my weight goal. I haven’t weighed myself in like forever, and have definitely gained weight, so whether or not one should consider this cheating, I manually pushed the road up to what I am guessing is probably my current weight and put a downward slope. I suppose I should also make a meta goal to weigh myself in order to avoid this happening again.
January 
February
March goal for applying lip balm before sleep has been working well. I will keep it for a while at least while it’s still cold and windy.
For April, I want to focus on walking more. I have had steps goal for years now, at a ridiculously low rate of 5,000 daily for the past few years. I have been mostly “dancing” parallel to the line in annual cycles: walking more in the warmer parts of the year and gaining buffer, walking less in the colder periods and eating it away. However, never over the those years have I gotten this close to the red line (apart from one occasion when I was planning to be bedridden post-op and had to add a flat spot for that, not having the buffer - but I think that was at a higher rate back then) as I am now, as this winter was too stressful and hectic to include regular walks just for fun, activity, and mental health. (Ironically!) So I want an extra nudge to make sure I am doing at least the 5k steps, in the form of a supplementary goal that receives 1 or 0 depending on the daily total. I wrote a script that checks that based on the steps count, but I can also manually enter 1 as needed once I hit the target for the day, and the script won’t shouldn’t go awry. With the rate of 5/7.
Just to clarify, is the spirit of the challenge that every month has to be a new beeminder goal, or can a New Month’s Resolution be an aggressive slope-changing of an existing goal? 
I’d say that’s up to you! It feels like a big change in the goal, maybe that should count.
January February 
March
I have done some spring cleaning of my goals, so I have scheduled some of the experimental goals to be archived soon.
The April goal of walking at least 5,000 steps on most days was a fun addition to my beeminding of the average step count. I definitely walked additional steps to satisfy this goal, making circles in my apartment or walking along the corridor in the building. I am scheduling this to end , as I expect the warmer weather to induce a natural increase in the number of steps soon.
And I am giving an early start to the May goal 2026may_drafts, in which I will be reusing the strategy that proved effective last year, where I focus on writing a few things that have to be prepared over a defined period of time.
Behind again, but:
March’s screen time goal was archived.
My goal for April is magazines and will probably be continuing. Perhaps surprisingly, this was not inspired by Nicky as I already had it in mind before reading about their magazines goal! Mine tracks pages, not whole magazines, and as you can perhaps see I had the slope set ridiculously low, but have increased it.
May’s goal will probably be a whittle-down goal to decrease open tabs in my phone’s browsers.
April resolution cleandesk – lanthala – beeminder has been doing exactly what I wanted; not only has it been trivial to keep my desk clean when I’m picking up anything off it every couple days, but having to hit the 5 minute mark means I’ve made a pretty big dent in the “box of stuff I’m going to fix someday” that lives on my desk shelf. Once that’s empty (something that may now happen in my lifetime!) I’ll work on processing the papers stuffed in the “maybe someday” section of my inbox.
May resolution is going to be a focusmate-sessions goal: focusmates – lanthala – beeminder I used to use focusmate heavily a couple years ago, but 2025 I got out of the habit (as well as out of the habit of doing anything, funny that). Now I’ve started it up again and it’s shocking how much I can get done in an hour of focused time. I’d like to start with 6 sessions a week; 4 a week is easy, but the extra two will have to either happen on the weekend (tricky to schedule in advance) or a second session in a day (like i’m doing right now!).
It’s always really motivational to check on this thread and see the kinds of things people are beeminding!
I had so much fun starting postcrossing in April! It’s been really awesome writing little messages to send across the world, and I’ve even already had someone from South Korea who wants to be penpals, which is so cool. I’m glad I took the plunge. Definitely going to keep up with at least a postcard a week, and maybe more if I can source some cheaper stamps.
For May I was in two minds, because it’s my bookclub’s Manga May(hem) event and I was going to ramp up my manga reading goal from a volume a week to a volume a day for the duration of May, but in the end I decided to just see how the month goes and not put too much pressure on it.
Instead, I decided on a Latin-related goal: latinci, to watch Latin comprehensible input videos on youtube at a rate of three a day. I’ve been counting up my study hours and listening is lagging behind everything else, so I thought I’d add the extra encouragement. Some of the videos are really short, like only 5 or 10 minutes, so I think this should be manageable.
Well, I miscalculated the slope on my dance outcomes goal for April, and made it too easy considering the amount of work I’ve had to put in. I’m going to carry over that goal for the first week of May since I have a big show on May 9th, but I’m also going to go ahead and start my May goal.
It’s time for another archiving goal for work. Once again, I have let the physical paperwork take over my office when it should be sorted and filed away at my employer’s office. According to the computer, I have roughly 399 bills of loading here that I can verify and send away, so it os my goal to have that done by the end og May.
It sort of doesn’t feel like it’s been a month with this goal? I think it’s still settling in, really. Most days I am managing to get at least 20 minutes away from the PC for lunch.
I’m not sure what that will look like in the next few weeks/months as I’m potentially taking on a new client/more work to fill up the time I’m no longer studying… but we’ll see. I’m keeping the goal active for now.
I have about 30 books on my “currently reading” list on StoryGraph, and I think that’s not including books I’ve officially indicated are “on pause”. I used to read like this all the time and loved it, but it is a bit overwhelming and leaves some books unfinished for a long time, sometimes even so long I forget where I’m up to.
So this goal is intended to tackle this a bit without treating it as a backlog to be whittled down per se. It’s a simple one: read 15 minutes of whatever book I’m closest to finishing. That should in theory help books get finished and off the list, without meaning I’m necessarily always reading the same book or focusing on books I’ve lost interest in or whatever.
I’m not sure how well it will work, it might end up only treading water and constantly reading whatever’s newest and shiniest, but we’ll see. I chose 15 minutes to start with because it’s doable pretty much any time, but I might increase or decrease it depending on how things go.
Both are going well.
Pushups are pushups. I started with 5 which was intentionally easy. Bumped to 7 past akrasia horizon.
I’ve had way less sweets in the office. Pleasantly surprised that colleagues by now know how Beeminder works and still stop by me when they’re making a round on the floor 
I’m keeping both.
In May, I’ll start with a plank-minutes goal.
April: hackeysack
The goal of this was to get outside and get better at hackeysack. It was successful in both of those, however I just don’t enjoy playing hackeysack that much so I am going to be archiving it.
May: basketball
In an effort to spend time outside and do something that brings me joy, I’m going to be playing more basketball and making sure I get out there.