Philosophy: what to commit to

From the Beeminder Slack:

So far I have resisted using commits.to for reading anything even when I genuinely do say I will/I should. It feels like cheating. On the other hand, a significant amount of my life involves reviews and ARCs and so on so maybe I should be committing to book related things (so people can see how reliable or not I am at following through, esp publicists and publishers). I… should put this on the forum for a proper discussion, shouldn’t I?

DONE.

So basically the question is about line-drawing. Say I promise @adamwolf that I’ll go pick up A Local Habitation and get on with rereading the first few books and then finishing reading the October Daye series – is that a commits.to thing? Does it become one if I’ve had one of the books in the series as an ARC and owe a review since, um, several years ago (in this case I do)? What about a book club, is that a commitment worth logging?

(Insert other often frivolous things here – video games, catching up with TV, etc etc.)

I think “things that other people are relying upon” may be a useful line in the sand for me.

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Great question about having a bright line. My answer is based on Natural Utterance:

But it seems that only a few people I already know really well in real life have adopted anything like that system. I can’t tell if most people don’t like it or if I’ve done a poor job of pitching the idea.

See, the natural utterance bit makes sense to me… and I naturally say “I will” about books (and it is a trigger I should act on)… but it feels like a frivolous use of commits.to!

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My solution to that is to retrain myself not to utter “I will” frivolously. But if I accidentally do then I stick to the natural utterance criterion because that’s the nice bright line.

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