Check in: I’ve slowed down on the rucking - I was being too ambitious with it to start, and now am mostly doing it during work lunch so that limits the time I can do it. Riding much closer to the red line now, but still keeping above it. I’m also not counting walking if I’m not carrying anything, unless it is a significantly long distance.
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Still scraping by on my reading goal! It’s a super-busy time at my job but I’m reminding myself that my existence extends beyond the drudgery of labor by throwing down a quick list of books that I’ve been poking my nose into:
I spent a couple fun days in February ripping through Patricia Lockwood’s most recent book, No One is Talking About This - if you know and like her writing from twitter or her memoir Priestdaddy, this is definitely recommended. It’s a short and digestible read, but not to be taken lightly, due to the subject matter (hinted at but not spoiled in the linked review).
I seem to be mostly dipping into and out of books without finishing much, but since this is supposed to be about enjoyment and not getting from cover to cover, I’m trying to just let it happen. I did revisit my fave William Gibson novel, Count Zero, which didn’t hit as hard as it did in high school but still a solid pulp sci-fi read for all my cyberpunks out there. I do regret getting rid of my first copy, which had a way sicker cover!
Other than that I’ve gotten about halfway thru The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism by Kristin Dombek. It’s a pretty engrossing little work of psychological history/cultural crit that I won’t try to describe fully tho the linked blurb does an okay job. Also been digging some of Isak Dinesen’s stories, of which my favorite is “The Young Man With The Carnation.” Was hoping there’d be full text available online somewhere since it was published in the US in 1942 and it’s a real pip, but alas. Here’s the whole volume it’s in on Internet Archive if anyone wants more info.
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I derailed on my goal. I set an alarm earlier than usual and was not fully committed to it. I didn’t get back in bed, but I did spend some sleepy time on the floor with a blanket and was not confident about whether I fell asleep or not … this behavior is typically how I used up my final buffer days.
I plan to continue the goal for now and may change the fine print to “laying on the floor means automatic 0” since that may help me make better decisions instead of thinking, “well, if I lay down on the floor with a blanket, I won’t fall asleep this time…”
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How’s everyone doing? I’ve had some very close calls of late with the yoghurty goodness, especially on days when I have a weird schedule. Still not really fitting it into my daily routine anywhere, I just do it when the goal says so. Still, I’ve been faithfully eating yoghurt regularly, and that’s a start.
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Here’s another update on my progress with the goal (working on my post-doc project earlier in the day). I haven’t reported earlier on the April progress because I was on a small vacation - and I was able to fit it in just by building up the buffer.
Here, you can see my vacation, the portion with barely any new datapoints in the last week of April and the first week of May.
The best thing is that I didn’t have to use any of my pre-declared vacation time to allow this myself. Instead, by working more than the minimum rate during the previous weeks, I have built up some buffer that I used up now. It helps mitigate a bit the perfectionist considerations on “how can you even go on a vacation when you could work more and more, always more”, which is a nice side effect in addition to simply getting the work done earlier in the day instead of postponing it to the after-dinner, as was my initial explanation of the need for this goal.
(There are, of course, more profound considerations on whether the hours of focused work - measured simply with toggl or with this fancy set-up - actually reflect any real progress. You know, you can be putting in a lot of hours but not get anything done as far as the declared outcomes are concerned. But that’s a totally different discussion. The focused hours are the best thing in my control, so I decided to beemind it.)
There are also some additional life changes for me, which I need to combine with still diligently and steadily putting in the hours of work on my post-doc. I was hoping that most of my year would look like sitting at my home office desk and contrived this goal to counter common distractions of that lifestyle. But now it looks like my life for most of the next months will be that of a digital nomad, with only occasional weeks at the home office desk that I set up for myself earlier this year. It is very new for me and I am not yet sure how I will manage that mentally, but having this special goal (with an extra level of accountability in this group, you know) actually feels like a very supportive thing to help me make sure that the project is not neglected.
On a technical note: I have heard back both from the summer school and the conference, so now that I have both the acceptance letters and the dates, I have added flat spots that were pre-declared above related to these events. 1 week in July for the summer school; 1 week in November for the conference; 2 weeks for the post-conference vacation. I still “have” and am allowed to apply as needed the 4 weeks of summer vacation. I will also go on another library research trip in early fall, but now that I understand that it won’t be much different from the rest of my year, when work and travelling has to be combined, I probably won’t even make it a flat spot and will just continue measuring the efforts in the regular way.
@shanaqui , now that I made it this far (2 months!), could you please add me to the list of participants in the original post? 
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Another month of running my goal has passed by, and it’s been going pretty well.
I started the month using up all of my previously accumulated buffer on a small vacation. Since then I have been able to gain some more buffer. I have spent most of the month in Kyiv, Ukraine, and we had some power outages. Initially (when I was only thinking about planning this entire thing including coming to Kyiv for library research) I supposed that power outages would stand in the way of working on my project according to the plan and at least add too much stress. But it was actually fine. I could actually schedule work sessions for the scheduled power outages (since my laptop is capable of working for another 2-3 hours without the electric supply) without distraction in the form of constant internet access.
Today, on the contrary, a more ‘nomad’ part of my year starts, and I’ll see how it goes from here. No scheduled power outages but a new city every couple of days.
I will probably apply some of my pre-declared vacation time to make part of June flat.
How have everybody else’s goals been going?
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I’m still trucking along with eating yoghurt – I’ve done well lately at eating one almost every day, and gained some buffer.
As for the effects… yeah, I think it’s working the way I want. It’s my exam time, I’m pretty stressed, but my GORD is really well controlled and I’m not having any discomfort, even without increasing the dosage of my medication. Once my exams are over, I’m going to tentatively try tapering off it and see how that goes!
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As of the end of June I’m at 30 books read in the first half of the year, so that puts me ahead of the 50 books/year rate I started with, but less than the 64 books/year that I updated the goal rate to be after the first quarter. So I’m not raising the goal rate again at this point. I’ll review again at the end of September, I’m hoping the next three months will be less manic for me than the last three have been.
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A monthly update on my work-on-my-postdoc-earlier-in-the-day goal.
During June, I used two weeks out of the (4 weeks total) “summer vacation” that I had allotted myself when I initially declared this goal. Spent them road-tripping Serbia with my husband.
Fun fact, I nearly derailed on the day after the vacation. I had no buffer, and since the goal is tagtime-pings-based… well, it was one of those days when pings seemed to simply refuse to come! Also had some errands in the morning, so couldn’t really use the best rewarded-per-ping hours of the day that day. I spent over 6 hours working that day just to get out of the red. while normally it should be around 4 on average. (Of course, of course, it all evens out across days… that’s the fun of having it tagtime-based, right?) But, out of desperation, I had to count the ping that came during dinner… because I literally caught myself in the process of wording some sentences for the draft I was working on that day when the ping came, while chewing! (Normally, I wouldn’t bother to count that - I usually silence the pings unless I am working on the project and waiting for pings.)
Aside from that, the goal has been running pretty well. Content-wise, too.
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Hiya thread! Hope you’re all having a great summer. Been quite a minute since I chimed in with an update on my reading goal. Gave myself a little flat spot while I was out of the country for a couple weeks in May/June, but I’ve been back at it since. Seems like I’m in feast-or-famine mode lately when it comes to reading for fun, so here’s a bit of what I’ve been feastin’ on:
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A very fun and pulpy C.J. Cherryh book called Hestia which I pulled off of a dusty used shelf (peep that cover!). I’ve heard her work recommended over and over, and being the sci-fi series commitment-phobe that I am, I was lucky to pick basically her only book that’s not one of 20 in an epic series.
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Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, a very wild (and possibly rather reactionary, depending on how you read it?) novel that I pulled off the Horror shelf, but scary doesn’t really describe it. Stayed up way late to finish this and felt very strange the next day.
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Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions, a recent Hollywood memoir by Ed Zwick. This is a type of book I basically never get tired of, and Zwick’s has the advantage of getting pretty real in its assessment of his own career (there’s a reason why “dishy” seemed to be the choice descriptor of everyone reviewing it). I mostly know Zwick as a co-exec producer on My So-Called Life, the iconic 90s TV series, and there’s sadly scant mention of it here, but it’s worth the read for dramatic re-tellings of Zwick’s struggles to make such prestige hits as Glory and Shakespeare in Love.
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Lately I’ve been dipping into an old fave, Michael Herr’s Vietnam book Dispatches. If you can stomach the general New Journalism style of overheated prose and occasionally making stuff up, it’s pretty cool - not if you want just the facts, mind, but if you’re interested in the cultural impact of the war (Herr worked as a consultant on the 2 best Vietnam movies, APOCALYPSE NOW and FULL METAL JACKET).
I also took a little jaunt thru an old classroom collection of fragments by the pre-Socratic philosophers. I studied this stuff in school and it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that basically all of Western knowledge as we know it started with dudes predicting eclipses and theorizing that the first humans were carried to term by fish, and that we’re still basically still stumbling around in the dark. If you have a minute, check this photocopy of some pages to see what I’m talking about.
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I’m still plugging away at this goal! I found a new live yoghurt so I can change things up, and this brand has a lemon curd flavour, which is pretty tasty. Not as big a fan of their rhubarb or strawberry, but it provides a change (much as I love the lemon curd flavour, I know I’ll go off it if it’s all I eat).
I haven’t yet tried to reduce my medication, though that’s definitely a medium-term goal as there’s been recent research showing long-term use is bad in any number of ways. 
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Another monthly update on my work-on-my-postdoc-earlier-in-the-day goal.
This month, I used a (declared in advance) flat spot for the week when I participated in a summer school. I am, technically, still gaining important skills for that same project in events like this, but it hardly makes sense to measure the effort in the same manner when I have to attend workshops and lectures on an imposed schedule. Would just gain an improbable amount of buffer and thus mess up my progress after the event.
Outside of the summer school week, I have been diligently working on my project, and I feel like this goal of mine still works great in adding the motivation to start working earlier in the day. I also have a parallel total-time goal, but if I only had that one, I would more likely only get myself to the work closer to the moment when there remains exactly this number of hours in the day. This month also feels pretty productive content-wise, probably since I moved on from mostly reading up on my topics and onto writing some pieces, conference papers etc.
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A monthly update for August for my work-on-my-postdoc-earlier-in-the-day goal.
This month, I scored the most hours on the project when measured in raw time (95) of all months so far, and the goal in focus, which takes into account and rewards the tagtime pings received earlier in the day, progressed from edge-skating upon return from the summer school I mentioned in the last update to having 11 days of buffer.
That said, I caught myself on a propensity to still find a way to procrastinate within the boundaries of putting all that time-measured effort into the project. I spent most of this month reading important scholarly studies that I needed to inform my next paper/article/chapter. Ok, I am not saying I shouldn’t have spent time reading those at all; it is all very important since I am branching into new subareas of my area of study (and I am thinking of all this postdoc thing as most useful specifically as a chance to extend my expertise a little bit into all those subareas/zones of interdiscliplinary inquiry). But if I ultimately need to have a written paper out of that all, it is also important to start actually writing at some point. Even if I later realize mid-draft that I need to read more before proceeding. But it is so easy - and truly acratic! - to just continue reading more and more of supplementary literature, because of course there is more to learn about that new-to-me subfield. Seemingly diligently working on the project and even learning many new important things - but is it really what moves me most effectively to the nearest preliminary deliverables?
So, at some point, I estimated the number of words I want to have written in the first draft versions of two papers/chapters that I am currently working on before my next travel plans and created an additional goal for that. Once I did, it turned out pretty easy to switch to the drafting mode that I previously procrastinated from switching to.
Beeminder to the rescue, as always! I think it’s an important thing to remember that even if there is one overarching goal that is generally working, it might make sense to create additional supplementary goals to encourage other subtle changes in behavior. Not all aspects of such a complicated behavior as working on an academic paper can be measured with one goal.
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Haaaanging in here with the yoghurts goal. Were it not for this thread, I’m confident I’d have skipped a bunch of times.
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Just checking in -my osteo exercise goal is going well. I bought a second rucking pack to keep at work so I can go out around the (very lush) campus at lunch/breaks, or do it in the interbuilding tunnel system if bad weather.
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I derailed on my books goal last week. At the start of the year I was way ahead of it and raised the amount of books I was planning to read. The last couple of months though have been a real struggle to keep on schedule and eventually I had to stop clinging on to the road my by fingernails.
However I’ve already read 42 books this year, which is three more than I read all of last year and I still have a good chance of reaching my original target of 50 books this year so I’m quite happy with it all really.
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September went well. I spent less time on the project than most of the months, and the accompanying raw-time goal derailed a couple of times, as well as the buffer of this goal here decreased from 11 days at the beginning of the month to 3 days at the end. But I wrote an entire draft of an article, which is one of the measurable outcomes, while everything else is just a better or worse proxy. The additional word-count goal that I mentioned adding last month helped but only partly so: I thought the number of words would cover one article and one shorter conference paper. But I went over the word limit with the article and never got to the conference paper. So this month I am running an auxiliary goal that takes into account a percentage of the total work to be done.
In October, this goal proved very useful again. Because the accompanying total working time goal derailed again this month (in addition to twice in September), it is very valuable to have this one as a safety net. I also ran a short-term auxiliary goal that helped me manage what the time spent on the project (measured as raw time or through tagtime with morning bonuses) actually goes to, because I had to force myself switch from one big thing to another big thing at some point, despite their actual deadlines coming a bit later and almost simultaneously. So, this month I finalized and submitted that article manuscript and wrote the conference paper from scratch. In the past several days, I started the library visit that will continue for another couple of weeks. (I initially thought I would make a break in the goal for it, but during another one in the spring I realized it works just fine. I am truly working on the project, and perhaps even more intensely in some regards, so why not.) Because the library’s working hours are so short and I am here only for 11 working days, I literally have to use every working hour - which means coming and starting the work much earlier that I would normally do. This goal, which rewards time spent earlier in the day, naturally has got a lot of boost just during these 4 days.
So, November will be that plus a conference, for which I have already applied the flat spot (super-busy and generally related to professional development, but doesn’t make as much sense to measure with tagtime when it’s panels on a schedule), and then two more weeks of a flat spot for the vacation that I have allotted myself when initially declared this goal.
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It was more difficult to keep to this goal July-Sept because my wife broke an ankle the first day of my July vacation so a lot of my non-working time got sucked into doing things for her, and household things she was unable to do. I did manage to sneak in enough walking/rucking to keep it going. I did pull back the total ruck pack weight so I could do longer sessions when I had the time. I just finished a “100 Rucks” yearly goal for a group challenge.
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I’m clinging on with my yoghurts goal! It’s been harder to keep up than I hoped, but I’m still here.
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