December is nearly over, and the Dry Run thread’s purpose has almost come to an end.
Now it’s time to nail our colours to the mast and run with a goal for the whole of 2024! The idea is to get some extra accountability about one single important goal, without getting overwhelmed. Eyes on the prize!
If you’re interested in shorter-term goals, my other car is a New Month’s Resolutions thread…
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 prize if they join before October 1st 2024.
Pick or create one goal. Yes, just one! Preferably a new goal, but at least something that isn’t a sure thing – something you’ve struggled with, at least a little. It doesn’t have to be the goal from the December Dry Run, and you don’t have to have participated in that.
Set an appropriate rate you know you can maintain without it being obviously bound to derail; try to set any holiday time now, etc. Realism is important: push yourself, but not so much you’re bound to fail.
To get listed in the Hall of Fame, post here about your goal. 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.
Every so often during 2024, let us know how it’s going!
You are a member of the Hall of Fame unless you derail, change the rate on your goal to make it easier, etc. If you do have to do that, you can move to the Hall of Recognition. It’s up to you whether forgetting to add the data and having support fix your graph counts as a fail.
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 one goal, tell us what it is, go for it without hesitation or deviation throughout 2024, or whatever’s left of it after the time you sign up!
Winners:
Everyone who participates, for doing their best to stick to their goals!
People who join before October 1st 2024 and remain in the Hall of Fame until the end, December 31st 2024, and who have posted within the last month at that point, will be entered into a draw for a voucher roughly equivalent to £30 at a place of their choosing which I can buy using a British credit card. By default, that’s probably your local Amazon, but I am very open to supporting local-to-you shops or giving you a gift voucher that covers groceries or a six-month subscription to a magazine, etc.
People who end up in the Hall of Recognition at the end of December 31st 2024, or join the Hall of Fame after October 1st 2024, and who have posted within the last month at that point, will be entered into a draw for a voucher roughly equivalent to £15 at a place of their choosing. Same deal applies.
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 each list.
Hall of Fame:
The participants who are in the running with no derailments, no rate-changes, etc. We’ve got this!
Participants who have pulled out of the race for any reason, or altered their goals to bend to necessity. We started the journey together and we’re proud of everything we did manage to achieve!
As predicted in the Dry Run thread, I’m pursuing a goal of eating live culture yoghurts at least six times a week on average throughout 2024. My goal is shanaqui/yoghurts!
I wrote about my reasons in some detail in the Dry Run thread; in short, my gastrointestinal microbiome is probably in a poor state due to my acid reflux, the medication I take for it, and the fact that I have had a cholecystectomy. There’s reasonable evidence that eating live culture yoghurt can help to colonise the oesophagus with beneficial commensal bacteria, at the very least, and quite a bit of evidence that even if bacteria don’t survive stomach acid (which some say they do and others say they don’t), useful effects are found throughout the gastrointestinal tract, including improvements to the immune system.
Ultimately, my goal is to manage my acid reflux through diet and lifestyle alone, to avoid taking proton pump inhibitors forever. If I have to, I have to… but yoghurt’s nice, especially that one with bits of peach in it that I like, and this is worth a try.
I don’t know when or if I’ll need breaks yet, so I haven’t put any. It’s a bit of a gamble, but if the usual live culture yoghurts I eat are not available to me, substitutes like drinking Yakult can count for this goal, provided there are live bacteria in it of the strains that provide the benefits I’m interested in. That should give me any flexibility I need!
I’m in with the same books goal I used for the December dry run. If I’d had this goal (read 50 books a year) in the past few years (and I have had it as a target on goodreads/storygraph for many of them) then the only year I would have survived since 2012 would have been 2021.
And I’ll happily add another £30 to the prize pool, and following skorytnicki’s example, if I happen to win I’ll donate it to a charity of shanaqui’s choice.
The goal is to respond to all pings that arrive while I am awake on a given day. Ultimately, that will give me a much better understanding of how I spend my time. Once I have a consistent tag habit, I want to build on it by introducing do-less or do-more goals for specific tags.
I have tried doing this in the past but stopped for two reasons:
I couldn’t find the perfect tag for some activities, and therefore didn’t tag at all.
I got annoyed by having to respond on my phone while I am working on my PC and couldn’t figure out a good way to keep the data in sync when I used a desktop and phone app in parallel.
With this goal, I will be forced to come up with some tag even if they are not optimal. Better to have 80% accurate tags than no tags at all, right?
Regarding 2, I will go for the Android app for now, but probably @smitop’s web app is the better idea. Can the web app send notifications on my phone (if I am logged in)? I should try that out.
Thanks for setting this up @shanaqui, I love seeing everyone’s goals and it’s great motivation for sticking with it.
I tried out a daily goal to take a creatine supplement in the December Dry Run and it went pretty well. I got off track for almost ten days after a long flight and change of location, but was able to get back at it pretty easily. There’s something extra magical about Beeminder for these kinds of goals that can be done in less than a minute if you’ve got the necessary ingredients and willpower.
For that reason, even though my average rate is around 0.5 for December, I’m pretty confident that I can average 0.8 for the year if I’m committed, and that will be much better for getting the benefits of the supplement.
I haven’t used beeminder lately and I will take this opportunity to start again with the goal of doing on average 100 pushups every day. Not necessarily because it’s what I believe will be the most beneficial goal but because it’s the one goal I kept for a very long time in the past and I should be able to do it almost everywhere. Let’s see how it is going, maybe it brings me into the habit of using Beeminder again.
I’m doing the same as my dry run (changed the name slightly) for doing 50 minutes per week of exercises for reducing the progress of my osteoporosis. This includes:
using a low frequency vibration plate.
weight bearing exercises like going down stairs, walking and rucking.
other targeted YouTube video exercises
I did okay for the dry run but that was with a lot of days off and decent weather. Keeping the same goal could be more difficult if going outside isn’t as pleasant.
A side benefit of thinking more about this is I have reviewed my supplements and changed some of the bone targeting ones for better calcium intake.
Thanks for joining me, everyone! I got home from NYE stuff with family and ate a yoghurt because of you guys. Otherwise I totally wouldn’t have yesterday. So we’re winning already!
I realised the common denominator impeding progress on most of my other goals is the amount of time I spend on my smartphone every day - currently a shameful average of 293 minutes. Granted, some of that is sat-nav use while driving, and some is listening to podcasts or music while doing other things, but still… yikes.
I set a ‘do less’ target and didn’t get the option to set a target number of minutes to aim for, so if anyone can see a way to improve my goal setup I’d be grateful to hear it
I’m not an expert, but I’ve read that 3-5g a day is best for most people. They’ve used slightly higher doses in studies that found cognitive benefits for older adults, and some protocols recommend a loading phase with much higher doses but that really doesn’t matter if it’s taken consistently over weeks-months.
Peoples’ responses vary, according to the literature, but it’s apparently most useful for people with plant-based diets. Personally, I find it really helps with muscle recovery when pursuing strength and running goals at the same time, and it’s probably a placebo affect but I notice increased mental energy and concentration.
I’m joining the party with my out-of-bed goal! This goal is a commitment to stay out of bed after my alarm goes off in the morning, with fine print specifying what this means. In spirit, the goal is a commitment to not snooze alarms or interrupt my sleep unnecessarily with electronics use. The fine print also makes this goal a commitment to not use electronics in the morning in bed when I am groggy and inclined to ruin my morning/day by doing so.
My hesitation/response to my own hesitation:
I have one hesitation about committing to this goal, which is that during the December Dry Run, I noticed myself setting an alarm much less frequently than I have in the past. As a result, I’ve been waking up later, sleeping more, and seeing more variance in my wake-up times. I think this is partly due to winter, the holidays, and biological needs. On the other hand, it’s been very positive for my physical and mental health to not use electronics in bed in the morning and to not set overly ambitious alarms that interrupt my sleep.
One way to see this situation is that the out-of-bed goal accomplishes a necessary but not sufficient component of achieving the sleep habits that I want. I can modularize the various components into various Beeminder goals, rather than wrapping them all up into one. For Ride or Die 2024 with the out-of-bed goal, I’m committing to just a couple aspects of improving my sleep habits.
Fine print changes
After the December Dry Run, I made some changes specifying under what circumstances I can change the alarm time. I also decided to take away the sick day exception. I replaced it with a break of an amount of days equal to the amount of sick days I anticipate I might need.
Hmm, it looks like your goal might be a whittle-down goal, actually – looks like it’s set up like an inbox zero goal. The easiest way to fix things up is probably to recreate the goal, since otherwise you’d need to have access to custom goals.
(If there was some confusion about do less vs whittle down goals, the support team would love to hear about it! This thread probably isn’t a good place to troubleshoot, but you can let us know at support@beeminder.com and we can work through it with you!)
Thanks, you’re right! I think I had in mind that the do-less would make me go to zero, but I realise that’s not right. I’ve recreated it and am going to use the ratchet feature to bring the daily max minutes down over time. New goal: screentime – hannahcatherinejames – beeminder
Throwing my hand in (on both this thread + this forum) with readingisfun2024, an odometer goal to read 3600 pages of anything (provided that it’s for fun) by 12/31. 2023 was an embarrassingly slim one for pleasure-reading for me, and I need more reasons to get off YouTube in the evening and give my eyeballs the gift of the printed word.
i’m sticking with my fregs goal that i have since the december dry run challenge. more regular fruits and veggies, omnomnom!
currently the rate is still set to 1/day, as it was for the dry run, which i expect to be upped significantly by the end of the year—but since lowering the rate disqualifies one for the hall of fame, i’m gonna ramp it up veeery slowly, very diligently, after a lot of thinking about it. (case and point: my new month resolution for january: fregstreme)
very excited for this, and for reading along with everyone else’s experiences. :) we can do this! 파이팅!
Yay! I’ve got a bunch of reading goals this year, though they’re quite high so I want to be more flexible with them than pinning myself down to them the way I am my yoghurts goal. But I’ll be reading a lot this year too (I hope). My mood is always better when I do!
Otherwise I totally wouldn’t have yesterday. So we’re winning already!
The easiest way to fix things up is probably to recreate the goal, since otherwise you’d need to have access to custom goals.