I have noticed that I might have slightly misinterpreted the challenge. My take has been to try some things for a month with the understanding that I will most likely drop them. While there is nothing wrong with temporary goals, it seems like the consensus is that trying something and then sticking with it is the preferred approach.
With that newfound understanding, I will review my monthly resolutions up to now and see if I can find better goals that I will be able to continue and find worthwhile. For that, it’s important to clarify to myself what I wanted to achieve in the first place.
January - old: /meditation-retrospective new: /morning-calm
The purpose of doing a meditation retrospective after each session was to spice up my practice, which has stalled a bit over the last couple of months. I gained some insights by recording a voice message after each session for a month, but it mostly became repetitive, so I dropped the goal.
I think what would be beneficial in supporting my practice is a ten-minute sit in the morning after brushing my teeth and before showering. The idea is to set the mood for the day and also capture some of the delicate sweetness of the mind in the morning. For this purpose, I have created /morning-calm, which retroactively replaces /meditation-retro and is set to a humble 8 minutes per day for now.
February - old: /freggies new: /freggies-prep
For /freggies, the intention was to eat healthy instead of unhealthy snacks. It failed because I was in an environment that didn’t facilitate easy access to fruits and vegetables, and also because I frankly couldn’t be bothered to track individual portions of what I was eating throughout the day. I claimed that I could easily solve this at home by preparing, and logging the freggies in one go in the morning, and that I would then automatically consume them throughout the day. I still think that’s going to work, so I am restarting /freggies, renaming it to /freggie-prep, and setting it to a moderate rate of three days per week. I am allowed to enter a one when I wash and chop at least three vegetables and put them into a container for later consumption.
March - old: /caffeine-less new: /fatebook
Lastly, for March, /caffeine-less is helping me prepare for my one-week fast. I won’t lie, it has been quite miserable, but the social pressure of announcing it here in the forum has definitely helped. I don’t know yet how I will continue at the end of March, but for now, I will definitely keep this goal going.
At the same time, I have reflected on why I misinterpreted the purpose of this thread and created bad goals (and frankly also the yearly resolution goal, but that’s for a separate post), and my current hunch is something along the lines of always trying the next fun thing without taking the actual effect on my long-term goals, well-being, and vision into consideration. Ironically, to counteract this tendency, I am going to try out yet another thing, which is making predictions on how beneficial I will find goals and to-dos that I create for myself. For this purpose, I have created /fatebook, which is set to 5 predictions a week. I am allowing myself to also make predictions outside of self-improvement.
I don’t think that’s a terrible misinterpretation! I’ve ended up keeping my goals so far, because they turned out to be useful in many ways, but I also envision some of them being stuff like monthly challenges (a November NaNoWriMo goal would be perfectly in keeping, for example, or I may have something specific during my exams), or just not good goals to keep around longterm.
That said, I have found this very useful as a testing ground for goals I’m actually going to keep. So there is a big benefit to it, at least for me. But I think you should use it however feels useful for you, and mix and match however you like.
My March goal focuseddays is going well. I still go to sleep a bit too late, but I have now adjusted to my new morning routine allowing me to be at the office before 9am. I like this goal and will keep it running in April.
April Goal: Track at least 5 hours per day in Toggl
I am starting my April goal toggl early to have a first week with a smaller commitment (4 hours). My goal in April will be to track at least 5 hours per day on average from Monday to Friday. I use Toggl to track productive activities.
For April, I am going to move iron up and down again aka /lift three times per week. That’s the most positive thing I can do for my health right now.
Really, I have to create good goals and get rid of the ones that aren’t beneficial or are neutral and just waste time. As I wrote above, the brain realizes that goals have to get done but that creates a tendency to commit to things that sound good (and easy), instead of attacking the real challenges.
🔴 January - new: /morning-calm
Sitting an hour in the morning would be good. Just doing ten minutes takes time away from my morning and I cannot get into deeper states fast enough to notice any benefits.
Getting rid of this. I am done with my January goals.
🟢 February - new: /freggies-prep
Well, I was fasting, so not too much to prepare.
However, the couple of times I have done it, it worked really well. Might update this to /healthy-snack-pack, but in general, this seems like it will work great for me.
🟢 March - /caffeine-less and /fatebook
Feels like I am finally of my caffeine addiction. I have to make a very deliberate choice in April if I start again.
I love fatebook. The calibration exercises are fun, and thinking about the probabilities of things I am going to do is fun too and encourages deep reflection. Good goal.
The next few months are going to be a bit of a challenge and I am determined to stay calm. Whilst I have ideas for monthly beeminder experiments now is not the right time to start too many new things.
So a very simple goal for April is breathingspace which is a very loose commitment to spend a minute or two just breathing between waking up and looking at a screen. My habit of realising I’m awake and picking up a device in the exact same instant is annoying me, even if sometimes it’s only diving back into the book I fell asleep reading. I think my brain needs a reminder to calm down and start the day slowly.
This one’s still rolling along, though I haven’t stepped up nearly as fast as I’d like. In part that’s been due to stuff going on; not sure how that will improve now that I have some stress off my plate.
This one has reaaaally suffered as I went into assignment crunch time, because three pages takes a surprisingly long time to write long-hand. I still think it’s a good ritual for me to have, though.
Unfortunately, this one was a failure. I derailed on it and ended it before the end of the month. In principle, it’s not a bad goal at all, but it added extra stress when I reaaaally didn’t need it.
It’s time for a bit of rest and recovery, and one thing that’s suffered a lot in the last few weeks is my reading time. So this is a nudge to get back to it! It doesn’t matter what I read, whether it’s audiobook or physical, just that I spend some time doing something I enjoy.
I’ll enter the data the following day (since I read right up to midnight on the regular), manually, based on whatever the Bookly app says I did for that day.
I already have reading goals for the amount I read in both number of books and number of pages, but this one is more to encourage me to take my time and read whatever I enjoy, even if it’s a big chonky book, or a new book that I’m not going to be able to finish that day, or whatever. Sometimes I get too focused on finishing, and that’s no good.
It’s a good idea to try and finish work earlier in the day, and I’m going to carry on with the idea. This goal is too rigid though. I did get other things done because I wasn’t feeling I ought to work in the afternoons but I hated leaving quick jobs until the next day and felt I was being flaky by doing so.
So the intention is staying but the Beeminder goal is finished.
A better set up for the goal would have been to have set a limit on the amount of time I was going to work after 2pm but that would also be harder to track.
February’s tidying up goals are still good but I’m putting breaks in them due to other stuff going on, it’s not a priority in my life to keep up with them at the moment.
January’s journal goal is going ok, I’ve slowed it down a bit but I still want it around.
March’s goals went… ok, I think. One of them went well, the other went fine, and I think the lesson I ought to have learned earlier was that, in order to go well, I need to do have an earlier deadline. Leaving everything to the end of the day just doesn’t work - I’m a morning person by nature, so best just get this stuff underway before noon, or it is all going to be done at 9 o’clock at night, and that’s not at all how I work best!
This month, I’m back to a classic, as I’ve fallen off my meditation habit of late: Meditation
whotidyroom is still going and is still on 7 days post-derail respite and 7 days autoratchet, which is still probably not ideal.
earlier goal thoughts
fregstreme (my january goal has been archived.
april goal
none again! i will be on a long trip in may, for which preparations are stressful enough, so i’m not gonna do a goal this time around, and likely won’t in may, either.
My earlier goals are continuing to serve their purposes, so at this point I’ll keep them going.
In March I focused on cooking and meal prepping more balanced meals (/homecooked). I think the Beeminder goal wasn’t strictly necessary, but it served as a helpful nudge that reminded me of that goal. I don’t think it ever made me do something I wasn’t already planning to do, but I bet that without the goal I would have been more likely to forget about this intention entirely.
My April goal took some thought because I’ve got a lot of goals in different life areas right now, and I don’t want to overload myself. I think focusing on productivity and work habits would be helpful, but I didn’t know how to set up a good Beeminder goal for that. I considered a goal for sessions on Flown, but Beeminder goals that have to occur at a certain time can be too rigid. My most successful productivity system in the past was Mark Forster’s Autofocus, so I’m going to try out Final Version Perfected with this app called Dalo.
I’m debating whether it’s better to count “days using the system” vs. “tasks I’ve done some work on.” In the spirit of Beeminding the smallest actionable unit (is that a Beeminder tenet?), I’ll pick the latter for now.
My new year’s “ride or die” resolution is based on reading books and I raised the rate of it at the end of March since I was miles ahead of it. However moving house has knocked into my reading time and I want to get back in the habit of reading more before I derail and a time based goal (at least 1 hour/day) for a month seems like a good idea.
I forgot to make new goals in March and April but have a plan for May: another attempt to get smartphone usage under control for good (hahaha, sure, this will be the time). poisson/phones_outside_zones
This one is a do-less goal, with an initial slope of 1/day. The item being tracked is unlocking my phone outside designated locations (“zones”, if you will) where I am allowed to use it. (Currently: buses, benches outdoors, and a specific chair in my apartment.)
This does buck my general trend toward replacing do-less goals with do-more goals, using the “1/day for not doing bad thing” method if necessary. But for trying to kill the habits of looking at my phone in forbidden locations, I’m worried about the “fuck it” effect (…I forget what we call that here) if I did the 1/day for “zero unauthorized uses”. So I do think this one really needs to be a do-less goal.
I’m not sure yet what I’ll do: ratchet? Autoratchet? Autodial? Some combination of these options? But I suspect in future the graph will look a bit more like it did in the first few weeks, and a bit less like it does toward the end, heh.
It’s easy to get into a rut, and it turns out I’ve barely been leaving the house. The weather’s getting nicer, so I want to try and prompt myself to get outdoors. For now, just going out into the garden is enough, as long as it’s intended to resolve this goal rather than just do a chore – emptying the rabbits’ littertrays doesn’t count automatically, but it might if I decide to take a peek at what our wildflower meadow is doing and spend a few moments just being outside.
Going for walks will certainly count, and I’ll quite likely use a walk to the postbox to send a card for Postcrossing as my inspiration at least once a week…
This went… ok I guess. I’d hoped to do better - sit for longer each time, I guess. I ended up doing the bare minimum each day, which wasn’t really as satisfying. But I have to be realistic about what my life can accommodate, and despite trying, I just couldn’t find a way to fit it in. It’s all about priorities, and despite in theory having lots of free time, in practice it never seems to come in the right sized pieces to fit in what I want to do.
Each day of life is packing problem, where there’s enough room in the suitcase for any one item, and even for a number of useful and interesting items, but not for all the items. It was ever thus!
My back is much better than it was a month ago, but it’s still not where I want it to be. And my knee is playing up again. I hate doing them, but I know the answer is to just do the damned exercises. So I’m forcing myself to do them by making them May’s goal.
My /aoc goal hasn’t gotten a lot of love recently. Therefore, I will make it my new month’s resolution for May to start working on it again, even though the goal already exits since the beginning of the year.
Stopped with this goal. I consider it a success as I got rid of a bunch of stuff.
In terms of stuff, there’s more to get rid off. Unfortunately they’re stored away and I don’t have a clear use for the space I’d gain for now, so no motivation.
🟢 - March - /hobbies-drawing
This is going on.
Recently derailed 2 times in a window of 2 weeks.
Drawing is fun when I’m playful. Playful fun is a key motivation for drawing. Life got playful, drawing got to the background I’m positive that drawing as source of this fun is great for me. So despite the pleasant distraction, I’ll stick to it with this goal.
🟢 - April - /steps
Lucky combination of spring, friends needing long calls, and the goal, I made a huge progress to get on track to my 2024 goal.
I’m not making it more ambitious just yet.
May - /break-day
As a small well-being experiment, I’ll be making sure that every 4th day is a day off of any “have to” activity - no social commitments, no beemergencies. If I need to work, then I do work, of course.
It may be fine if it’s every 3 day once and the 5th after. That’s part of the experiment so I’ll beemind at a rate of 1/4 (days) and first Beemergency will be in 7 days.
Had a very productive month but I don’t think this goal had much to do with that! It was useful to try out a productivity system on a more daily basis because I think the style of work I do – lots of lab experiments and data analysis with very continuous flow – is very suited to this sort of system. As long as I designate a goal for the day (e.g. finish this experiment, work on this section of the manuscript), I don’t really need a to-do list most of the time. It was useful to try this out to reflect on it! I archived this goal a little before the end of the month.
Trying to add lots of diverse fruits and veggies and seeds and whole grains into my diet, which was kind of spurred by the success I had with the /homecooked goal. I started this goal in late April, and already my meals are more colorful and I’m feeling more satisfied. I’m fortunate to love eating fruits and veggies, I just forget to buy and prep them if I’m not planning ahead. This goal has already helped make that a habit!
March goal: At the office before 9am
My March goal is still running, but at a slowed down rate because of travelling and temporarily commuting from a further distance to my office. I am hoping to get back at my usual rate once I get back to my regular routine.
April Goal: Track at least 5 hours per workday in Toggl
My April goal was going quite well, but some life circumstances put a break to keeping up with this goal.
May Goal: Track at least 5 hours per day in Toggl
For May, I will get back to tracking productive activities in Toggl and I will extend my goal to include most weekend days with the usual work days (with some predefined exceptions).
This was a bit of a problematic goal to be honest. I was busy and wanted an easy goal and didn’t want to box myself in by defining it too strictly but I just ended up being not really sure if I’d done what I intended. I fell back asleep a few times, should I count that or make myself wait again? It also made me think about Beeminder the second I woke up every day which, much as I like Beeminder, wasn’t really the relaxing start I was after.
I derailed mid-month and the buffer that gave me let me pretty much forget about it for the rest of the month.
I do think I’ve got a tiny bit better at not reaching for my phone the second I open my eyes though.
This was the month where I stopped all the previous month’s goals; there were just too many things going on and I needed to get clear some mental space.
January’s journal goal - I’m still journalling intermittently but with too many other things having greater priority the goal was making me write rubbish entries quickly.
February’s tidying goals didn’t fit with the house move and new routines at the new place. I’m still tidying up most evenings (much easier now I have a dishwasher again) and I may bring bathroomclean back when I’m a bit more settled in.
So there is a big benefit to it, at least for me. But I think you should use it however feels useful for you, and mix and match however you like.
March - /hobbies-drawing
due to the discomfort of trying to draw something, not being able to draw it (not well, at least).
I’m positive that drawing as source of this fun is great for me. So despite the pleasant distraction, I’ll stick to it with this goal.
It was useful to try out a productivity system on a more daily basis because I think the style of work I do – lots of lab experiments and data analysis with very continuous flow – is very suited to this sort of system. As long as I designate a goal for the day (e.g. finish this experiment, work on this section of the manuscript), I don’t really need a to-do list most of the time. It was useful to try this out to reflect on it! I archived this goal a little before the end of the month.