I derailed on the readinghour goal - got way ahead then stopped tracking the data so closely which then let it slide too far back, but got it going again after that. It stopped me derailing on my books goal though which was the intention.
I’m not inclined to keep this going long term because it’s a pain to keep track of manually, but I have extended it for another week and may do so again.
This is a good follow-up to the reading hour goal as it takes the opposite approach. Get rid of the time sucked away by getting caught in endless scrolling on my phone. This is a good goal to have now as the next month is election season here in the UK and I’m very likely to find myself wanting to scroll far beyond usefulness.
I’m using the Timing app on my mac which pulls in the screen time data from my phone. I’ve roughly categorised the various projects I have there into things that are useful to do on my phone and things that aren’t, and then I can get a figure to give to Beeminder. Data entry is delayed by a day since the app takes a while to catch up.
I’ve given myself an hour/day rate and plenty of buffer. That’s both to ease myself into the goal but also because I don’t want to get caught up in whether my categorisation is correct enough, I feel like an hour a day should be plenty enough screen time for even the useful apps. The major exclusions are mapping/navigation, fitness, books, music/podcasts, the actual telephone thing; all things I generally only use my phone for and, if they are time wasters, then I feel they are the good sort.
I achieved the goal, and archived it, because it was too lax and defined too broadly. I did get outside more than usual, but that wasn’t really what I wanted of it. It’s not really the right time to create a more focused goal for going for more walks… maybe once my exams are over.
In the last few days of May I started checking in daily with a friend who is going through a bit of a rough time, leaving voice notes and chatting back and forth a bit. It felt supportive and nice for me too. So on top of my usual /reachout goal, I’m doing this for a month (or until we get sick of each other). I’ve set the rate to 6/week, just so that if I’m really feeling down or something and I don’t think she’s up for hearing about that, I can skip a day here and there.
physio exercises
Derailed once on this in the month. Even though I do hard gym workouts multiple times a week, I’m still caught out by how hard doing the physio stuff is! It’s just unpleasant, and honestly without the Beeminder goal I wouldn’t have even done it as often as I did. Which is a bit ridiculous, as I know - from actual lived experience - that it helps. I’m archiving this one, though, as I don’t have the stomach to force myself through it for another month
June goal setup
photography
After much agonising, I bought a new camera a couple of days ago. I love doing photography, but honestly I also love owning the technology. The new camera is a Sigma FP L, which is the smallest full-frame camera in the market, and clocks in at a remarkable 61MP. It either looks extremely cool and high tech (according to me) or like a weird metal brick (according to my wife). Anyway, I need to get out there and use it, rather than just admire it and its (according to me) extreme loveliness. So this is a goal to do that - much more fun than physio
Still going on. I find it motivating to build up buffer here.
I configured the graph to display my data until October. Hoping that I’ll get motivated to build up a buffer that will take me through November and December:
The thesis that preparing freggies leads to eating them still holds. However, preparing is super hard and annoying for me. I have some fundamental issue with food where I am eating pretty decent for the most part (say 90% of the time), but I just cannot figure out a way to make it 99% consistent. Really what I need would be a multi-layer system with goals for meal-planning, grocery shopping, cooking, and it’s not a priority because, again, I am mostly doing pretty good. Archiving this for now, until I have the energy to come up with a better system.
🟢 March - /fatebook
I have started to make predictions whenever I notice myself making a prediction about things a couple of weeks or months out.
The only improvement could be to make predictions about things that I can look up right away.
🔴 April - /lift
This went perfectly in April.
Then I got sick and only did the minimum to log a successful day for a couple of days which annoyed me and ultimately I archived the goal. (Or maybe I derailed. I don’t remember.)
I will give this another shot later in the year.
🟢 May - /aoc
This was a fake out because I couldn’t thing of a proper goal. Since I actually enjoy solving AoC challenges this one was easy to get back into green.
For June, I am going to reactivate /caffeine-cycle. After not having any caffeine in March, I have gone back to full on addiction mode, so this goal allows me to only have caffeine every other day.
For June, I commit to going out for a run twice per week. I love running, but I have not been out for runs in a long time. I want to use this goal to get back into running more regularly.
This has been really nice. I don’t think I’ll keep on at this rate forever, but I think both me and Amy have benefitted from chatting more regularly. For now I’m leaving it as-is!
One problem I have is with eating quite close to bedtime, which isn’t good for a number of reasons – the one I care about most being my acid reflux! So I’ve set up a goal with a 5/week rate and a bit of initial flat spot to make sure that’s doable, given I also need to keep my yoghurts goal running, plus sometimes have issues with dinner that require me to eat some kind of snack. (Texture sometimes, also just realising partway through that it’s too fatty for me to be able to digest, because I don’t have a gallbladder.)
I’ve not had a clear idea of what to do for July, I’ve had numerous ideas but none of them were really something I felt I could concentrate on at the moment because of other things going on. So when I thought about it it was obvious that the goal should be to move one of those annoying things on.
finishwah is a goal to finish off a work project that seems to have been dragging on forever. The rate is set to 3 pomodoros/day, which by the end of July is a total of 87, or around 43 hours of work. Should I finish the project off before the end of the goal (which I hope I will but suspect there is plenty to keep me busy) I’ll repurpose it to work on the next annoying project on my list.
June Conclusion
I’ve just about got to the end of my lessphone goal. It’s been reasonably successful. I haven’t yet derailed on it and the data has been less troublesome to input than I expected as the data is pretty much automatic, just the entry to Beeminder is manual. It’s been useful to watch when I use my phone a lot and to note the ways I get around the limitation I’ve put in place. I’ve extended the goal for another couple of weeks though I need to get in touch with support to fix up the graph as it hasn’t dealt with the ‘flat spot’ on a do less graph as I expected it would.
May Followup
The readinghour goal has now got me ahead enough of my books goal, which it was supporting, that I’m happy to stop it. I’m just forgetting to track and enter the data for it now.
Lichess puzzles
I came up with several options here, but in the end went for a Lichess Puzzles option, after I saw someone else with a chess puzzles goal. My chess is slowly improving, but by no means monotonically - I stepped up over a rating which was a multiple of 100, then fell back to below it again in short order. Disappointing, but my analysis is that (as ever) I need to work on the simple stuff. Lichess lets you select puzzles associated with a particular part of the game, so since it’s my end game that’s particularly weak, I’ll bias the work towards those.
June goal ending
Photography
I used my new camera to great effect throughout June, and more than once the goal forced me to go out and find some interesting new angle on some familiar object. So a good goal, although I don’t particularly feel the need to push it into this month.
January - new: /morning-calm February - new: /freggies-prep March - /fatebook - still having fun with this one April - /lift - I am restarting with this one soon May - /aoc - Still doing this one. As I said, I enjoy it.
June - /caffeinecycle
Yeah, I don’t know why I did that to myself. I can either be a decent human or not have caffeine. It’s concerning but also not anything that needs fixing right now.
New: July - /review
I am going for another semi cop-out and restart my review goal. The point is to open random notes and review/update/delete/sort them. I remember that I found that somewhat beneficial and enjoyed doing it. I don’t know why I ended up archiving it.
This may not be fully within the rules, but the past couple of months were extraordinarily overwhelming and trying to come up with a resolution besides “keep head above water” was a bit much. But I realized that I started a couple of new goals towards the beginning of June and July, and I’ll mention them here in the spirit of the thread.
This has been very successful! My diet has significantly more greens, veggies, berries, and whole grains as a result of this goal. It’s a very helpful nudge, and I’ve been able to keep it up, besides a blip at the beginning.
The Beeminder integration inspired me to check out this software, and I’m currently enjoying their student trial. It turns out that I did really need a budget! It’s helping a lot with the chaos of moving countries while being in between funding sources. This goal (in line with Beemind what you buy) has me track reconciliations.
The time has come for me to write up my DPhil thesis – another eek! But a very exciting one. I’m writing it in Overleaf with commits to Github, so this goal just tracks commits. I’m not tracking any sort of word count requirement at the moment, just encouraging myself to work on it often as I’m still juggling some final experiments.
I have also been neglecting this. I did restart my weight and calorie goals in July, but I suppose I didn’t post here in time, not to mention neither is really new.
I’ve been thinking about loads of different goals for this month, but in the end this is something that I’ve been struggling with a bit (as opposed to e.g. going for 3 walks a week, which has been going fine). As part of the activity score, Oura has a counter of how much time you’ve spent sitting or standing still all day. I’d like to reduce how much inactive time I have – I can never eliminate it, since I have a desk job and like raiding on FFXIV, but I can reduce it and get it into good bounds. So this is a Do Less goal for inactive time, and we’ll see how that goes. I’ll probably add data for the previous day each time, backdated, rather than try to update the goal at midnight or something.
January - /morning-calm February - /freggies-prep March - /fatebook - still having fun with this one April - /lift - I didn’t restart this one May - /aoc - Still doing this one. As I said, I enjoy it. June - /caffeinecycle July - /review I am glad I reactivated this one. It’s fun to read old notes and diary entries from a couple of years ago.
August - /limit-sugar The goal is to track added sugars and keep them under 5g per day.
I’ll soon be on the job market again, so it’s time to study a bit specifically for this. Initially I want Beeminder to just get me started, so it’s at a modest 1 hour/week.
This month I have decided to resume using YNAB. However, it looks like now isn’t the best time to start trying to use the integration. So instead, I’m going to make another goal to tide me over, and try to enforce proper YNAB use indirectly.
I think what I’d like to achieve is that I actually preemptively make sure that there’s room in the appropriate category of my budget before every purchase. So for now I’m going to try a simple 1-per-week do-more goal, poisson/purchase_plan, to plan what I’m going to buy in the upcoming week. I’m not going to actually penalize myself if I buy something that I didn’t plan to buy for now, but certainly the idea is that I will try hard not to, and if I find that it’s happening a lot I’ll scrap this and make a goal that actually penalizes it.
The goal this month was doing more chess puzzles, which I achieved comfortably. There was a point in the middle where my Lichess authorisation token had expired, and I didn’t notice until I was close to derailing: once I’d refreshed it, Beeminder caught up on the backlog and everything was ok again.
August goal
I feel the need to work on flexibility for my body. Generally my fitness is excellent, but stretching tends to be put on the “one day, soon, I’ll get to that” - so this month, I’m getting to it! We’ll start small, and maybe build up as the month progresses.
Review: Push-ups goal has been going well. I have also kept up with my running even though I discontinued the Beeminder goal at the beginning of the month.
August: No new goal for me in August. I want to focus on keeping up with my running and push-ups.
I derailed on my new month’s resolution goal in August. I didn’t have any clear idea of anything I wanted to do that was going to reduce stress rather than add to it so I skipped a month.
September Goal
We got to the end of a year-plus long house move in July but I have a load of stuff that was supposed to be sorted out before we moved that’s still hanging over me. Lots of boxes with indeterminate contents, too many books to fit on the shelves, a pile of old computers that need sorting out, various bits of the new house that aren’t set up how I want them to be, etc. Vast quantities of sorting out have been done but I want to get everything properly sorted so sortout is my new goal to do something towards this three times per week.
July Conclusion
This was good really. The work project I was wanting to finish off got finished. There was one derailment when the goal was due on the weekend and I couldn’t be bothered with it but that was fine.
)
January - new: /morning-calm
March - /fatebook - still having fun with this one
April - /lift - I am restarting with this one soon
This goal (in line with Beemind what you buy) has me track reconciliations.
March - /hobbies-drawing → /drawing-24-ii
