I decided this month I need something a bit chill, a small habit, and maybe also something that’s fun and refreshing instead of another obligation.
So in the end, I redownloaded an old app, Serial Reader, and made a goal for reading at least 1 serial a day. Because it takes me only 5 minutes to read a supposed 15-minute segment, I’ve set this goal to the “cap1” aggday so only +1 per day counts. That way I can keep track of how many I’ve read on any given day, but not earn loads of safety buffer from it (e.g. today I decided to finish the serial I was on, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, so I read about 10 issues in a day, oops).
poisson/purchase_plan is working more-or-less as intended. I occasionally forget to plan for something that I really do need to buy, but it’s more often managed to stop me from an impulse purchase. I’m going to keep this, unchanged, for now.
September goal
As some of you may know, I’ve been playing with tocks a bit recently. I’m going to make a tock goal.
Now, this leaves the question of whether to set up the goal like what bee did (incidentally, I see the goal is archived now…), or something else.
As it stands… a lot of my day-to-day goals are quite nebulous. So I end up with a lot of tasks where what it means to complete it is a bit ambiguous, or where if nothing else it’s quite hard to estimate how long it will take, and a lot of tasks run over the end of the tock. So… Should I use Bee’s scoring system, and try to overcome this? Or just accept it?
I think for now I’m going to go with Bee’s scoring system, under the assumption that forcing myself to make tasks more precise must be a good thing. We’ll see how that goes.
This was to do daily stretches, which I managed every day but one (I think I just lost track of not having done it by the evening!). I’m quite pleased with progress here, and I can - on a good day! - now just about get my nose to my knee in the particular stretch I was working on.
September
After a bit of thought about some things I need to get better at remembering to do, my wife just suggested bundling them into one goal. So I now have an evening checklist goal to make sure I get those chores done at the end of each day. They’re pretty mundane things, but it’s annoying when I miss one of them, and I sometimes have literally gotten into bed, then had to get out again to do one of them. The hope is that this will remind me before that point!
January - /morning-calm February - /freggies-prep March - /fatebook - turned the rate up a bit April - /lift May - /aoc - still fun June - /caffeinecycle July - /review - still helpful August - /limit-sugar - I’ve derailed once or twice, but in this case the goal is doing its thing and helps me lower my overall consumption. I will keep it.
September - /daily
This goal was originally for doing a daily check-in and didn’t stick. I repurpose it as a daily mini-journal. I got this from a YouTube video, and the idea is to write a single sentence summary of the day. If there was a good, bad, or interesting event, that should be reported, otherwise, it can just be a about whatever is most salient. The goal is to do this for many years going forward.
I have been writing journals on and off for many years, but I usually never go back to read anything (except via my /review goal, but that only works for digital journal entries). Having a lighter journal like this could make it useful in the sense of “going back to 2024” and figuring out what was most important at that time.
I have a private Nextcloud instance that I’d like to migrate away from. Currently there are about 72.2 GB worth of data. If I manage to clean it up by 18th of this month, I save €3.75
I can’t whittle down anymore, so here we go the other way:
I can’t believe it’s been a month of this goal already! I’ve read a few different serials over the course of the month, though currently I’m taking it steady and just reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one issue a day. I’ll be keeping this goal for now.
This month’s is a wholly practical choice: I’m going to handle an email backlog. Technically there’s a few days of August email in there too, but mostly it’s the backlog from September.
Unlike the others, this is definitely just a goal for one month.
Well my goal for September went badly. Two derailments and though I’ve done numerous small things I don’t really feel the goal gave me the impetus I wanted to sort things out at home. And I’d say that was because I hadn’t really thought through how busy the month was going to be with other things.
October Goal
I was tempted just to give up on this as I’m not really sure the goals I’m coming up with are being useful or worthwhile but that’s possibly just because, for the most part, I’m coming up with them quickly at the end of the month to satisfy the goal. [1] Then I thought that I could use the goal to do something about that. My note taking, planning and time blocking systems could all do with a bit of an overhaul. So plan, which is a commitment to spend some time planning this month but for which I don’t have any set plan of what to do because that’d be a bit recursive. I’ll probably use my default time block of a 25 minute pomodoro timer to update the goal though, because that bit of my current productivity system works well.
[1] The nature of the project means that I don’t want to include goals I make mid-month, though it might be more Beemindery to just have a goal to make 12 new goals a year. But then it might be even more Beemindery to have a goal to not make more than 12 new goals a year.
January - /morning-calm February - /freggies-prep March - /fatebook - turned the rate up a bit April - /lift May - /aoc - still fun June - /caffeinecycle July - /review - still helpful August - /limit-sugar - still helpful September - /daily - I like this one. It’s like creating a mini diary.
October - /caffeine-cutoff - In a renewed effort to get my caffeine addition under control the purpose of this goal is to not have any caffeine past noon. Hugs and celebrations to me.
Thanks to a luggage delay with an airline, I got an unplanned break. Then my luggage arrived but I didn’t cancel the break ^^ Despite that, I’m doing good at this.
I had a big time success in September with goals I created outside this thread. “/decafternoon (no caffein after 13:00)”, “/duskdiet (no food after 20:00)” and “/hours-without-news (timer running & no news reading for 4 hours)”
(The latter hasn’t worked out entirely as I wanted but the intention and focus that came it with the goal helped enormously. A newspaper on a Sunday does the job more than enough. I’m going to replace it with “days without reading news.”)
All these goals have a “increase time that counts towards a goal” so I want to direct it towards another goal – not using my phone in the morning.
The anki goal is going well! There is a bit of tension in setting the slope—right now it’s too easy to force me to keep on top of my reviews, but I don’t want to make it too much harder or else at some point I’ll need to start adding cards faster than I want to. But I’ll keep tweaking it.
I want to apply for a few faculty jobs in the next couple months and I really should spend a lot of time on that in the next couple of weeks, so I’m going to make a simple toggl goal for hours worked on that this month.
plan was a reasonably successful goal despite two derailments (once I forgot weekends, once I was ill) and I’ve extended it at a lower rate for another month since I think it’s something where I get surprisingly good results for small amounts of effort.
November Goal
office-sokoban this is basically a focused version of the sortout I was trying to kickstart in September but specifically for my office which has had too many things in the wrong place for too long. It’s literally moving piles and boxes from one place to another until they are all in the right place, and all the right places are already filled with the wrong stuff, so I’m framing it as a game of sokoban to try and game myself into actually moving things rather than just focusing on the computer screen and ignoring all the mess behind me!
Every year, I make a custom advent calendar of gifts for my wife. Every year, I’m barely prepared by the time December starts. This goal is sadly a bit too late to change that for this year, but it will hopefully keep it on my mind and keep me working on it through the month, instead of panicking at the end. Right now it’s set to 5 min/day, but I should probably increase it.
This went well! Aside from the last few gifts which haven’t arrived (scheduled for late in the month), everything is wrapped and labelled, and all the drawers of the calendar are filled with chocolate and goodies. The goal will end soon, since I don’t think I’ll need the goal to help me finish up the last of it.
The Steam Deck goal is for using an expensive gadget I’d been neglecting, and also playing games that aren’t just Final Fantasy XIV (much as I love FFXIV). It’s already going very well as I finally picked up Persona 5 Royal, and am deeply absorbed.
The blog comments goal is hoping to help me prioritise answering comments on my blog, visiting people back, etc.
How did anyone find the experiment in general, by the way? I really liked it, actually. I did add some goals that didn’t work long-term, or didn’t produce the effect I wanted, but I’ve kept a few of the goals, and either way it encouraged me to experiment and treat each month as a fresh start on some front or another.
I think I might do this again in 2025. Right now I can’t think of a goal I want for January, but I’m sure it’ll come to me, same as it did for the 12 (plus a bonus) I’ve tried out this year.
The idea is actually very useful for me but haven’t been able to make it work practically.
November - skipped month
It’s been a tricky month, and I ended up neglecting this idea—even forgot to create the goal! Funny enough, it still crossed my mind, so a little of the intended effect happened anyway!
December - pushups
Inspired by @felixm, why not? Spending a lot of time at home, so might as well get moving more—push-ups it is!
I’ve tumbled into a sabbatical. And I’m taking a week to reduce urgency load as much as possible. This goal kicks off today but stays flat for 7 days.
January - /morning-calm
March - /fatebook - turned the rate up a bit
August - /career-learning
and counting.
So… I’m having some difficulty directing my attention.
November - skipped month
Spending a lot of time at home, so might as well get moving more—push-ups it is!