🎆 New Year's 2019 Survivor Challenge

If you haven’t already seen the Beemail or the blog, you can check out our game of New Year’s Resolution Survivor here: blog.beeminder.com/survivor.

If you’ve thrown your hat in the ring, this is a place where we can chat, cheer each other on, psych each other out, talk about how it’s going, and just hang out with other Resolution Survivor challengers.

(Hat tip to user slothbear for the idea to create a place for us to chat about this!)

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I’m definitely going to do this, but I need to spend some time thinking about what goal to use! Do I want something ambitious, to get an extra kick to do it? Do I want something I’ve already done for years, like “Extend my duolingo streak by another 365 days”, to continue my success spiral? Something in the middle?

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Can I have the goal of playing my guitar at least 10 minutes every day that I have it available? There are times I travel & don’t take my guitar.

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I’ll answer my own question. One alternative is to change the goal from ‘play guitar’ to ‘practice guitar’ and do other forms of practice on days I don’t have a guitar with me. (Study music theory, memorize the fretboard, etc.)

Another alternative is to go ahead and give myself credit on days I don’t have access to a guitar.

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I love your first answer and hate-hate-hate your second one! :grin:

For normal beeminding it typically suffices to just schedule breaks a week ahead of time. For the contest that’s not allowed but you can still schedule breaks on all the various holidays and other likely travel times. (The rule is any break you schedule before midnight new year’s eve is allowed.) If you’re not actually traveling then you’ll just be building up safety buffer.

Which brings me to my other answer: as a trip approaches, double up your practicing and build up enough safety buffer to carry yourself through it!

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My goal is consistency, not quantity, so a buffer won’t work. A year ago I set a goal of 100 days in a row of practice and it had to be 10 minutes or more to count. I’m up to 350 days. On the days I didn’t have a guitar I did 10 minutes or more of some other type of practice as I mentioned earlier.

So I’ll word my goal that way for the coming year. By the end of 2019 I’ll be within striking distance of 1000 days in a row.

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One of each? :smiley: I’m throwing three hats into the ring, so to speak – my Game of Books goal (extension of previous), my crafttogether goal for sitting with my wife and crafting for at least 3 hours a week (something in the middle) and my UFOs goal (something ambitious).

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two more questions!

  1. what about not-legit derails? do they count for NYSurvivor?

  2. can I put a private goal in the ring?

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I like this way of doing it. 10 minutes of some kind of guitar practice, whether that’s with a guitar in hand or not is great, cause it keep the QS-first principle in mind (we’ve got a few formulations of it out there, but for my own stuff, I tend to think of it as beeminding in a way where the data you collect is always interesting and accurate nd meaningful).

  1. The derailment rules mostly stay the same for contest goals as they do for all goals, so you can cry not-legit if it’s not a legitimate derailment. And since it’s not a zero-sum game, if some people are making their fine print harder than others, that’s okay, cause that’s just the shape of the goal that they want to achieve.

  2. Nope to private goals, I’m afraid. Sorry!

I’ve been away from Beeminder for a few years. I’ll need to figure out what QS is.

Will I be able to mark the few days that my practice is sans guitar?

I guess I’ll be downloading the app and catching up on Beeminder’s changes & improvements.

  • Zane

So…I set up a step goal synced to Fitbit. I started a few days before the New Year because…why not? I noticed something strange, though…the y-axis values were way high. When I went to statistics, I noticed that somehow my 4,000,000-step goal had a starting point of 160,000. Why would that be? I don’t want to change anything because I’m afraid that would disqualify me from the challenge, but I really want the numbers to be accurate. Help?

I found the problem…Beeminder had imported three previous weeks of Fitbit data, which I definitely didn’t want. I deleted the old data, but the starting point stayed the same, so it said I derailed. I deleted the goal. Tried to start it again, but same thing happened. :frowning_face:

I’ve put in the following

  • Productive hours: relative safe although i’ve eaten through enough buffer during these holidays
  • Strava calories: also safe unless I injure myself
  • French: used to be safe but is constantly in the red the last month - the challenge will be an added
  • Expenses tracking: brand new goal to fix yet another procrastination issue

Please tell me zedmango is some sort of inside beeminder joke:


And yes, that’s the survivor page.

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These are private goals

Is it too late to add a new goal to the challenge? I’ve already added one, but created a new reading goal today which fits better as a challenge.

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I think a 3-4 days grace period should be allowed. I only found out about this a couple days before the end of the year.

I wondered as much but thought the “only public goals” rule to be stricter. But now they all seem to be public so nvm that. Mostly I really wanted there to be some running gag.

@zedmango I love your username :slight_smile: Also 7 goals in the challenge? Nice!

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Aww thanks!

No running gag, though if you want to see a great running gag you should check out the 1/0 webcomic.

And I should have 8 goals in the challenge! I just threw all my goals in hoping I could stick to one of them at least.

My goals were set to private when I joined, so they were nice enough to let me change the privacy settings to maximal privacy (hide the numbers on the y-axis, datapoints, hashtags, fine print, genericize y-axis label) before I made the goals public to keep with the rules of the challenge.

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