If you havenât already seen the Beemail or the blog, you can check out our game of New Yearâs Resolution Survivor here: blog.beeminder.com/survivor.
If youâve 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 itâs 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!)
Iâm 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 Iâve already done for years, like âExtend my duolingo streak by another 365 daysâ, to continue my success spiral? Something in the middle?
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 & donât take my guitar.
Iâll answer my own question. One alternative is to change the goal from âplay guitarâ to âpractice guitarâ and do other forms of practice on days I donât 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 donât have access to a guitar.
I love your first answer and hate-hate-hate your second one! 
For normal beeminding it typically suffices to just schedule breaks a week ahead of time. For the contest thatâs 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 yearâs eve is allowed.) If youâre not actually traveling then youâll 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!
My goal is consistency, not quantity, so a buffer wonât 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. Iâm up to 350 days. On the days I didnât have a guitar I did 10 minutes or more of some other type of practice as I mentioned earlier.
So Iâll word my goal that way for the coming year. By the end of 2019 Iâll be within striking distance of 1000 days in a row.
One of each? 
Iâm throwing three hats into the ring, so to speak â 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).
two more questions!
what about not-legit derails? do they count for NYSurvivor?
can I put a private goal in the ring?
I like this way of doing it. 10 minutes of some kind of guitar practice, whether thatâs with a guitar in hand or not is great, cause it keep the QS-first principle in mind (weâve 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).
The derailment rules mostly stay the same for contest goals as they do for all goals, so you can cry not-legit if itâs not a legitimate derailment. And since itâs not a zero-sum game, if some people are making their fine print harder than others, thatâs okay, cause thatâs just the shape of the goal that they want to achieve.
Nope to private goals, Iâm afraid. Sorry!
Iâve been away from Beeminder for a few years. Iâll need to figure out what QS is.
Will I be able to mark the few days that my practice is sans guitar?
I guess Iâll be downloading the app and catching up on Beeminderâs changes & improvements.
SoâŚI set up a step goal synced to Fitbit. I started a few days before the New Year becauseâŚwhy not? I noticed something strange, thoughâŚthe 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 donât want to change anything because Iâm afraid that would disqualify me from the challenge, but I really want the numbers to be accurate. Help?
I found the problemâŚBeeminder had imported three previous weeks of Fitbit data, which I definitely didnât 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. 
Iâve put in the following
These are private goals
Is it too late to add a new goal to the challenge? Iâve already added one, but created a new reading goal today which fits better as a challenge.
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 âonly public goalsâ 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 
Also 7 goals in the challenge? Nice!
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.
