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.