Week 9 Summary
Not a good week for graphs again, with 19h total - but 3h 30 was travels and utilities, then I spent 7h on Messenger (compared to 1-2h on a regular week) because I used it to video call my wife when she was away.
Take them away, I have consistent 12-14 hours, with 1h of doomscrolling a week, the rest is utilities, talking with friends, banking and switching between the apps.
Derailments
That being said I exhausted all my buffer on pick ups goal with 666 pick ups. Now the real game starts to keep it under 50 a day. This should be the final boss, as I can promise you that now I control total screen time.
I derailed in the phone in the box goal - I set ambitious goal to 4h a day, but my automatic integrations are very poor. To make it well, you really need a stateful device like I had. I set the commitment to 3h a day now (was 2h initially).
Thoughts
Since I use beeminder to change the life structurally perhaps for the first time (not anki or books goals) I have a few notes:
- beeminder promotes micro habits and they don’t really help (strong opinion, weakly held). I fell into trap of microgoals like “no phone before 8 AM” etc. It’s a very bad thing to do. Design of the goals matters more than following the goal. In many cases, I think I confuse types of goals. One type is “setting the floor level” (phone pick ups, fall asleep time) and other is achieving your dreams (completing PhD, coding your app, learning Spanish etc).
- beeminder is not the best tool to change the “architecture of the day”. Many of you check “fall sleep time” or “wake up time“, but I have intuition that the real problem is somewhere else (weak opinion, strongly held).
This is not a critique of beeminder, it’s just a very versatile tool that has some usage patterns and its own logic.