It’s 1st January 2026, and thus high time to be thinking about New Year’s Resolutions!
We’ve had two previous formats in these forum threads: in 2024, we aimed to keep on our goals and never derail or change rate the whole year. In 2025, we embraced No Excuses Mode, allowing rate changes and derails, as long as we never called non-legit.
I think the 2024 format was more popular, though 2025’s is perhaps more in the spirit of things, allowing Beeminder to align your priorities without twisting your arm, and without punishing failure so harshly it feels like failure. Still, this year, you can choose from either aim, or both!
Rules:
You can join whenever you like; it’s never too late. Sure, the idea is all about taking advantage of the psychological value of the Gregorian New Year… but I’m not averse to helping you capitalise on the psychological value of starting right now instead. That said, people will only be eligible for the Hall of Fame prizes if they join before October 1st 2024.
Pick or create a goal. You can only create one per challenge, but this year you could create one goal for the No Derailing challenge, and one for the No Excuses challenge. The aim is to pick something that you might find it hard to stick with, and might be tempted to quit without the extra social accountability provided by this thread.
Decide whether you want to enter yourself into the No Derailing challenge or the No Excuses challenge, or both.
To get listed in the Halls of Fame, post here about your goal, and let us know which challenge you’re opting into. You don’t have to share the link if you don’t want to; it’s okay to be very vague about what your goal even is, if you like!
Post to the thread every so often to talk about your progress. If it’s rough, maybe some support will help. If you’re doing great, isn’t it nice to get cheered on and congratulated?
You can be a member of the No Derailing Hall of Fame unless you derail your goal. You can be a member of the No Excuses Hall of Fame unless you call non-legit on a derailment. If you’re no longer eligible for a Hall of Fame, you can move to the Hall of Recognition. This year there is no rule against changing your rate in either challenge, though you may wish to self-impose it if that worked well for you.
This is all self-reported: I’m not checking up on you. Don’t forget to let me know if you need to move into the Hall of Recognition instead!
If someone hasn’t checked in for a while, it’s worth asking how they’re getting along! We’re trying to support each other here.
No browbeating. It’s about accountability, but it’s a supportive kind of accountability.
Short version:
Pick your challenge: No Derailing, or No Excuses
Create up to two goals (one per challenge)
Let us know in a post here, with any details you care to share!
Stick to your goal throughout 2026!
Winners:
Everyone who participates, for the grit to keep sticking to their goals no matter what!
People who join before October 1st 2025 and remain in at least one of the Halls of Fame until the end, December 31st 2025, and who have posted within the last month at that point, will be entered into a draw for either £30 via PayPal or the equivalent amount in an Amazon voucher.
People who end up in the Hall of Recognition at the end of December 31st 2025, or join a Hall of Fame after October 1st 2025, and who have posted within the last month at that point, will be entered into a draw for £15 via PayPal or Amazon voucher.
Please note: these rewards are from my own funds and are not prizes administered by Beeminder or by me in an official capacity as Beeminder’s support czar. It’s just a personal gift from me to participants, chosen randomly from the active members in each list.
No Excuses Hall of Fame:
The participants who are in the running without calling non-legit:
Participants who have pulled out of the challenge for any reason. Maybe the goal didn’t work out, maybe the pressure felt ick, but you should still be celebrated for giving it a shot!
I personally will enter myself in both categories with my no-longer-experimental 2026books goal!
This is an exact repeat of my 2025books goal: from 1st January to 24th December, I will never have more than 20 books bought this year that I haven’t yet started. Books enter the list when catalogued onto StoryGraph within 5 days of purchase, and leave the list when started.
Closer to the date, I will schedule a biiiig jump in for Christmas Day, allowing me to safely get as many books for Christmas as my friends and family desire without derailing. The goal will remain flat at that total until 1st January, at which point it will start decreasing, probably aiming to have no books remaining unread from 2026 by 30th June 2027.
This goal worked really well for me this year: I absolutely nailed it. Even though I kept on mood reading as usual, and never committed to reading a specific book by a certain date, the goal kept books top of mind, and the mood came round more often than not. I’ve read everything bought before August already – and that just wasn’t the case historically.
Combined with my backlog goal, reading 100 books from my pre-2025 backlog, I made a substantial and permanent-looking dent in my to be read pile for the first time in years. Can’t wait to see how it looks after this year!
My goal for this year will also be about reading. A few months ago, I realized I am reading only from a very limited list of cultures. Earlier (a few years ago), I actually already thought I would like to read from some new cultures (specific direction was defined a bit differently at that point) but because it was a vague wish, nothing happened on that front – literally 0 books were read.
So I decided to make this a formalized year-long challenge. I identified a list of countries from which I have read something (relatively modern), which ended up around 34. Then I made a list of potential texts from countries from which I had not read anything yet, making sure they are reasonably spread among the continents. If I were to read 1 such book a month, I decided it will be 3 from Asia and Africa each, 2 from Europe and South America, and 1 from North America and Ocenia.
This was in late September. I envisioned one huge problem with the feasibility of this challenge: I have an issue with translations, so I didn’t want to commit to the year-long thing knowing this might be an issue. Hence, I decided to use the remaining 3 months of 2025, add three slots, and start immediately. Since you see me having arrived at this point where I am committing to the entire year, you can already guess that the trial period was successful. But it actually started pretty badly, and the first two takes were DNF’s partly because of the translation, so I am very glad I am past that trial-and-error phase and have more certainty at this point when I am committing to the entire year. I actually have done 7 countries (including one dependent territory) so far - plus read an eighth title to sub one of the DNF’s, so I am starting the year with a bit of buffer.
The actual parameters of the goal (tbr_world) are as follows:
10 pages/day, for the entire year. This was calculated based on the average number of books in a preliminary list, which was ~300, so the idea was that I will total 12 (15 with the added months) over the challenge. But the idea is just to continue at 10 pages/day for the entire year, regardless of how many titles that will be.
What counts: books written during the past 50 years from countries I don’t consciously remember reading anything from (from this recent period). I should try to switch between continents but it’s okay to count one after another from the same continent if I had an external reason to choose that as the next title (e.g. it was an ARC with a deadline).
I should be only tracking one book at a time - i.e. I might be reading the next one in parallel, but only one is counted towards the goal at a time, I should finish or formally DNF it before I can get credit for the pages read in the next book.
In case one of the titles is a graphic format (I already had one picturebook and one graphic novel in the trial run), I am strongly recommended to ratchet the road by the number of pages, but I am free to decide when to ratchet — e.g. if I need buffer asap ahead of a trip to reduce overwhelm, I may use a quicker-to-read format for that and only ratchet later when I am past that stressful period. But otherwise all formats count: long fiction, short stories, children’s books, graphic formats, memoirs, essays, (poetry, drama — yes, but I don’t currently have any on the list of options and it’s not something I read often).
I don’t have to stick to the original list; adding new ARCs, newly published translations etc. is totally acceptable. Just when adding, I should strive for the spread between the continents — at least the original numbers listed above for the continents should be achieved by the end of the year.
If I DNF, I count the number of pages I actually read and move on. I may count another title from the country from which I DNF’d something, but I don’t have to. I may not count another title from a country from which I read a full book (e.g. sequels, if I choose to read them, do not count toward the challenge).
I attempted not to include outwardly diasporic authors as representatives of their countries of origin, but this is a heuristic criterion, not a strict no-no if an author dared to spend any time outside of their country of birth
I may include some still colonized territories as entries if the voice is distinctively non-metropolitan and strongly associated with that place, because it would be awful to exclude a culture based on their lack of success in gaining independence. But if all goes well, I am already thinking about another challenge for reading from stateless cultures for 2027.
Type of challenge: No derailments. That is, no changes to the road allowed other than ratcheting to cut some of the accrued buffer.
I am also throwing in my 30 Euros into the cauldron for the draw! (And let me think if I have another in mind where the no-excuses challenge will make sense.)
Yes, I found the goal that will benefit from the extra accountability for the No-Excuse challenge: tbr_pur_pages_stale. It’s also about reading, specifically a whittle-down for the total number of pages in the books in my TBR, where the number grows exponentially as a book ages (x2 over a year’s time). This should encourage me to read earlier acquired books and to think twice when grabbing new ones (ARCs, library, books on sale). If I post how the graph looks right now, an apt eye will see immediately the 4 spots where I… ahem… made excuses instead of legitly derailing.
And from here, I will hide the past period and start the year with the extra accountability from this challenge. Legitly derailing and adding allowances for the future, acrasia horizon respected, is allowed. (And this creates a loophole of how quickly the books should be processed and accounted for after acquisition for this not to be cheating by not entering the pages into the database. I think within 24 hours should be reasonable - unless it’s a “read now” for a limited time or a library item for which my turn came, so I have to grab asap but am too busy to immediately add all the tags by which the code pulls the titles from goodreads etc. - then by the end of the week should be okay. @shanaqui I remember you had some really good thoughts on a similar matter - was it in your journaling thread? IIRC, it involved accountability to your partner? I am thinking of how to avoid a slippery slope here.)
UPD: so, in normal circumstances, I should process add all the books to the database within 24 hours. But because this year I will have an extremely uneven workload throughout the week, I am leaving the possibility that, if I had to grab something in-between other stuff, I must absolutely process it when my less busy part of the week happens, which by definition will be within acrasia horizon (or, if missed and that addition would have caused a derailment, backdate a datapoint to enforce a derailment).
I did have a whole deliberation about this for my to-be-read goal and 2025books. Let’s see if I can find that… here we go! Me and my wife worked it out, and here’s what we came to:
Books are removed from the count on the day they are started.
Books are added to the count on the day they are catalogued and added to my StoryGraph TBR list, unless this is unreasonably delayed:
If the cataloguing is more than five days after the buying, and would have derailed me, then the datapoint should be backdated and a derailment should be forced, unless the circumstances were exceptional (such as an exam, unexpected trip, etc).
If I started reading any of the new books without cataloguing all of them, the data should be backdated to the day I started reading them. Exceptional circumstances also apply in this case.
Fine print written with and approved by Lisa, on 1st June 2025.
Yes, thanks for finding and reposting this logic! I just wanted to compare my logic to yours for some common sense, to make sure I am not creating a slippery slope by being too lenient in this aspect. And thanks for organizing this challenge, I find them really inspiring.
No Excuses: my meta goal dailylatin, to spend at least a minute reading from the Legentibus (Latin learning) app every day. Hopefully much more than a minute, but that’s all this goal asks from me!
No Derailing: like both of you, a reading goal! books26, a goal to read 60 novels in Japanese in 2026. I managed 80 last year, but I’m going to try to be a bit more gentle with myself this year (and allow for more diverse hobbies).
I was thinking about what to do in the shower this morning, and I was considering yet again making some kind of “process goal” that I hope will somehow make me more productive, since work remains the thing I want to improve at the most this year. Something about GTD-style weekly reviews, or monthly plans, or something. But then I read the goals here and kind of felt these were too boring and abstract and frankly not really a challenge—either you do the thing every week or not. Maybe I’ll try something for February’s New Month’s resolution.
Instead, I will do one thing which is still helpful for work but a bit more Classic Beeminder, and a second thing which isn’t work at all.
No excuses: I want to get to bed by 23:00 more consistently. I’m going to make a goal poisson/sleepyhead, imitating Ceph’s goal. Basically, the idea is a do-more goal where I get 1 point for going to bed on time, 0.5 points for being one minute late, and then a smoothly decaying amount after that. This has to be in the “no excuses” challenge because I’m really not sure what the right slope is, and I’m going to be adjusting it a bunch.
No derailing: I’ve handled becoming vegan pretty well (now 6 or 7 months in?) but it’s definitely decreased the variety of things I cook. I’m going to make a goal to cook something new once a week, possion/kitchen_innovations. What “new” means is a bit ambiguous—if I just try subbing out a single ingredient, is it something new? I think the only way to really have a hard, unambiguous line is to make things pretty lenient, so I will. If a single ingredient or step has changed, it counts as a new recipe. If the amount of an ingredient has changed by at least 50%, it counts as a new recipe. In practice I want to mostly cook things completely different from things I’ve cooked before rather than having to check if something’s over the line, however.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and finally managed to work out the exact numbers over the last week. I knew I had an unreasonable number of unread physical books in my house, but I wasn’t sure how many. I’ve now gotten them all cataloged in StoryGraph, and including the new book I got at a later holiday party, the number goes up to 149. I want to get that number down to 139 by the end of the year.
Can I read more than ten physical books in a year? Undoubtedly. Can I read more than ten physical books that I own, not from the library, without acquiring more? That’s more of a question. So I’m trying to keep the challenge realistic, while still keeping me on my toes–I definitely didn’t read this many books from my own shelves last year and I acquired plenty.
The goal is here: tbr – claredragonfly – beeminder The slope doesn’t start to decrease until the end of the month to give me a chance to actually start a book from the TBR.
Because this is a manual-entry goal and I have to do a bit of clicking to find the number, I plan to update it weekly, rather than daily, which would get to be tedious. To help with that I’ve set up a meta goal as well: tbr-meta – claredragonfly – beeminder (I don’t have to limit myself to weekly updates, but if I update more than once a week I will ratchet the meta goal so I have to keep working on it.)
This is to use my money to purchase music (digital or physical) that I’ve listened to and enjoyed on streaming services, preferably DRM-free and in a way that maximises the money going to the artist. The motivation is that I’d much rather have my music local to me somewhere I know I can access it rather than sitting on a megacorp’s server and possibly taken down at any moment. And right now seems as good a time as any to spend more money on art made by actual human artists.
I approve! I’ve stubbornly stuck with my music collection through the years and I’ll never switch to streaming! Which isn’t what you’re saying you’re doing, yet, but baby steps…
Had my first derail on my no-excuses daily Latin goal already! Big apologies to the poor Beeminder support person who had to read my vaguely petulant email calling non legit (I did the time with Latin, just forgot to update the goal due to a skull-splitting migraine), and then my almost immediate frenzied follow up where I had remembered that this was my no-excuses goal, asking to ignore my previous email full of excuses.
Because the daily Latin goal itself is autodata from metaminding my Legentibus app goal, I think my confused brain briefly thought the whole thing was automatic and forgot the part where I have to enter my time spent in the Legentibus goal. I don’t know how these things work, but it would be a dream if one day there was Legentibus autodata support.
Well, this was a learning moment, albeit a humbling one, and on the bright side, at least I know the streak isnt REALLY broken in my heart. Onwards!
