My goal is to cook more often (cooking). The plan is to write a cooking plan for the week, derive a grocery list from that, go grocery shopping on Saturday and then to cook the meals.
Currently my main problem is that cooking always seems to take too long for me to be able to incorporate it into my everyday life. I hope that through this goal I will learn to simplify the meals and to acquire some routine to be able to cook faster.
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I’m in with a goal for 2024 and I will also add $30 in line with @skorytnicki 's example.
My goal is beeminder which requires me to eat 2 servings of vegetables a day. I generally don’t have a problem with eating vegetables but often will fall back on some “more convenient” processed, packaged food. The veggies then go bad in the fridge, so this goal not only helps my diet but also hopefully reduces food waste!
I am being conservative with the serving size and generally won’t count potatoes as a vegetable. I sometimes make a big salad for lunch, which takes 10-15 minutes of preparation - in that case, I’ll only count it as 3 servings. A serving really needs to be about a cup of cooked or raw vegetables to count - I can’t get away with eating one broccoli spear or on baby carrot.
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I’m in, with the Self-Gratitude Quotient goal that I posted about in the Dry Run thread.
I’ll add another £30 to the prize pool.
@shanqui thank you for arranging this!
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I’m committing to being at work by 9am every day on average (with a small amount of built-in wiggle room for fickle public transport or illness). My job has flexible hours, which is lovely, but I’m tired of procrastinating in the mornings when I don’t have any urgent concrete tasks for the day. I end up accidently eating into evening hours which I want to spend with family or doing important/fun/restful things.
I need advice on how best to set up the goal. I could just have a simple do-more goal where I enter a ‘1’ on the days I meet my time threshold, but I would prefer it to be more nuanced and centered on the average, e.g. I enter the number of minutes I arrive before 9am as positive numbers, and the number of minutes I arrive after 9am as negative numbers. Thus I can make up for lateness one day by being early the next. Would this work? Or would this create a non-sensical flat line?
Glad to be here, and thanks!
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Hmm, I think I’ve seen people set up goals like this, so I think in theory it works, but I’m not totally sure if it would work in practice. One point is that a single day you were late could unexpectedly eat up more safety buffer than you’d expect… but in general I think it’d be okay. You could give it a shot and commit properly once you’ve trialled it for a couple of weeks? 
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I just ate my yoghurt already today, at 2pm. A fluke, or is this goal actually making me work it into my day?! Stay tuned. 
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Thanks!! I’ve set up my goal workbee49. A flat line caused weirdness, so the slope is currently set to ‘two minutes before 9am per day’, which is a little hard for me to conceptualize, but I think it just means my target average work arrival time is 8:58am. I will keep entering data and see how it works out in practice! I suspect I will need to do a lot of racheting, because I don’t want it to be okay for me to be late for a week because of previously built up buffer. I just want to keep enough buffer that I can have a later morning on a given week if I choose to (procrastination-free). The real-world goal is to build a habit of going to work efficiently in the mornings. 
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I’ve had a rough couple days and forgot two days in a row to turn off an alarm on my phone that preceded the alarm I actually wanted to use… bad sleep on those days meant I decided to not power through with staying out of bed, so I ate up 2/8 of my buffer days. Eek!
I didn’t encounter this in December…the variable that has changed is that my rechargeable alarm clock died. Just the tiny amount of friction related to charging the alarm clock has caused me to use my phone instead. If my alarm clock is charged, my phone is usually powered off at night so I’m not in the habit of turning off the reoccurring alarm. My immediate solution, which I just implemented, was to…delete the reoccurring alarm.
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I’m participating with the same workout-resolution (intro post) goal I used for the dry run. I haven’t stretched the limits of my maximum buffer yet, so I think I should be good to go straight through this year with no breaks.
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Hi all, my goal is FocusedDays. I commit to no news or entertainment (i.e. distractions) between 8am and 6pm for 4.75 days each week. The motivation is to avoid distractions and procrastination during workdays. I opted for 4.75 instead of 5 to allow for days where a major event may compel me to reasonably consult the news. Thanks for organizing this!
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I’m curious what +1 and +0.75 mean for your goal.
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I created the goal in “per day” amounts and I intend the goal to be a pass (+1) or fail (+0) goal so that +1 means that I successfully avoided digital distractions during my work day (unfortunately no success today 
). (The commitment is 0.68 “focused days” per day, but the data entry will only allow +1 values for when a success occurs.)
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So far, this has worked well, as as I am concerned. I derailed once and afterwards thought the quantification of the goal might have been the problem. Previously, it was 1 point for a long list of tasks (writing the week’s meal plan, writing a grocery shopping list, going grocery shopping and, of course, cooking). So I changed it so that I get a point for each of these activities and I want to get to 4 points each week. In most week this will be equivalent to going through the chain of tasks listed above and cooking one meal.
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I am still grimly eating my yoghurts on most days. The worst is when I forget until very late in the day… that’s the prime time for me to forget to do it at all. So as I’ve suspected in a past post, I absolutely do need to think of a way to find it a place in my routine.
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Last week I ran low on self-cooked meals and the evening hours when I wanted to do grocery shopping and cooked passed frustratingly quickly. However, I managed to cook a couple of meals and am good to go with self-made lunch-to-go until Thursday. I plan to make a salad on Wednesday in order to extend my “rations” a bit.
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Creatine goal is going fabulously. It’s a nearly ideal use case for Beeminder because the simple nudge is always enough to make sure I follow through on the habit. I think I’ve only missed two doses in the new year, one when I was on a plane and one when I was ill and decided not to take any supplements.
I should probably ratchet now that I’ve reached 15 days of buffer. 
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My yoghurts goal continues okay. I did have to fudge it for a couple of days (ate a non-biolive yoghurt with a dose of microbes in pill form) due to disruption around my wife’s grandfather’s funeral, but that’s within tolerance for the goal: yoghurt and microbes were consumed together, if not in the absolutely ideal form.
Also made me think I should buy those yoghurts (link for anyone in the UK) just for an additional yoghurty snack, even if they won’t count for the goal. 
The banoffee pie and lemon curd ones were amazing, and I wanna try the hazelnut one and the rhubarb and custard one. Plus maybe associating yoghurt with being a funtime snack might help cement grabbing a yoghurt as a habit.
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Still alive on my reading-for-fun goal, though I’ve eaten into my safety days, a consequence of choosing a starter book that I was excited to read but is proving pretty rough to get through.
That would be Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; or The Transformation, a novel of social decline in which a mysterious stranger destroys a wealthy Pennsylvania family from inside by using his power of (get this) ventriloquism! Also features murder, insanity, and spontaneous combustion. It’s actually a pretty worthwhile read but, as you can experience for yourself if you dig into that Gutenberg link, the prose is basically written like the Declaration of Independence. It was penned in 1798, after all, and was a huge sensation at the time and a major influence on US “weird fiction” via Hawthorne & Poe.
Anyway, to fill up my page count while I worked through (i.e. fell asleep reading) that one, I also picked up some short stories by James Tiptree, Jr., real name Alice B. Sheldon, a sci-fi writer who’s really fascinating in both life and work. Some elements of these stories from the 70s and 80s haven’t aged so hot, but I definitely recommend her novel Up The Walls of the World, which sort of splits the difference between trippy PKD-ism and more galaxy-level societal speculations of like a Le Guin book.
Also started on Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in The Castle, since I bought my niece a very neat-looking paperback copy for xmas. So far, it’s as good as they say!
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I derailed on my goal. But it is ok, it was ambitious one.
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Check in: I need to either increase my weekly goal or auto ratchet because I’ve added a yearly challenge set from another site that is making me too successful. I’m now rucking (hiking with a weighted pack) a couple times a week- this adds a lot of time relative to my original planned qualifying activities so that’s giving me too much leeway.
For the moment I am auto ratcheting to 14 days. After seeing how that goes I may also increase the goal.
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