General impressions
- As any last week before a trip, this week has been pretty hectic, but I am mostly managing it. There isn’t really what to report in the regular scheme of derailments/finished goals, so I decided to do a check-in on how recently introduced goals are working.
Update on recent new goals
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pages_arcs - works fine, despite the couple of derailments initially. I have now finished one book with this goal already and started a second one. I have changed the metric to Kindle locations from real-life pages, since ARCs usually come without pages and I had to do an additional calculation to figure out my current page.
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nails - works great, my nails and cuticles are grateful
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birding_feb_complete - I am honestly not always sure about the utility of this goal. I can definitely do it, wouldn’t do it without the goal… but the real-life meaning of the need to track for at least five minutes all the 6 pigeons that are observed in my yard… slips me quite often.The annual goal birding_2025 which gently nudges to go without too long of a break seems more reasonable.
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photos_2024 - works great, I did some intensive attack on the photos backlog on the weekends. With the ratcheting, it now says that I will do done mid-July, having already cut a month (while having the goal for less than a month).
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bookblog_wordpress - recently was wondering why the script doesn’t seem to work and add a bump for the recently finished-yet-to-be-reviewed book. Apparently, I had auto-ratcheting, which is absolutely unnecessary now that the road is flat. Glad to catch this inconsistency before it cornered me to commit to something I am not able to do, like review more books that I have even read 
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5-a-day, which is actually 7-a-day for this month of February. Most of the days, it gently nudges me to make a salad instead of something less time-intensive like cooked rice with eggs. But I have almost totally stopped doing any cooked vegetables, because there’s now an implicit “if spend energy cutting veggies, make it count”. Will see how it works when I will be away from home for the next 1,5 month. I am usually even more lazy with cooking anything elaborate when my partner is not by my side to enjoy the meals.
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teeth_by_noon - does what was intended for. Intend.do integration helps.
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to-dos-dones - works fine, though this set-up doesn’t effectively catch the fact that I am completing to-do items slightly below the rate. Mostly works as a reminder to set intentions daily.
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lit_classnotes_anki and lit_anki_cards - two metrics to make sure I look through my lesson notes and make anki cards out of them. Works as intended! Side effect: it was fun to look through lesson notes from a year ago and get reminded of what were the relevant concerns in my life then. (A significant part of the classes is speaking practice, so the lesson notes reflect current personal life events by reiterating what we said but in the grammatically correct way)
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the 3 tbr goals - I am not sure they are working as intended, because I keep purchasing more books for my project (kinda justified, it’s my paid job) without always scheduling a jump beforehand, and requesting the ARCs totally at a whim
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forum_journal - obviously, working great! Side effect: I am much more conscious of my beeminding than I have been for years, when I would just keep the same goals with the same rates. And here just look at how many new things I have tried to track recently
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There is not much to report this week in my regular format apart from the upcoming two-day breaks across most of the goal for the days when I will be driving and then flying back home.
But I wanted to share some impressions about what I consider a procedural success with my photos backlog goal:
I usually schedule a jump for this goal when I am on a trip with a lot of sightseeing and birdwatching (because putting a limit on taking new photos is not the aim of this goal), but this time, because I have recently implemented some new practices on attacking this backlog, I actually had enough buffer to accommodate for the new photos under the red line despite adding a couple of hundreds daily on some days. The practices in question: having a separate goal for an isolated backlog just for 2024 (so I actually have to work on that pile even if I am also going through recent photos at the same time) and working in smaller catalogues in Lightroom, so that the entire thing is not as lagging and cumbersome to deal with.
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General impressions
- This week I arrived to Serbia, so the beginning of the week was hectic (and with breaks in the goal roads) because of the preparations and travel, and since then I have been trying to settle in the routines for the next few weeks while I am here.
New goals
- sleep_by_12 - restarted this goal that failed and was archived a couple of months ago. Now: going to bed on my own is quite a problem for me. It’s something opposite to PDA - I am totally fine when my partner nudges me to already start preparing to go to sleep (so we end up going to sleep only a couple hours after he would naturally by himself /s), but when it’s for my own good, it’s just so hard. And normal beeminding doesn’t help: when it’s closer to midnight or past midnight, I am already in the state that I am too tired to care. I don’t even care about a very immediate consequence of feeling like crap the next day, so I clearly don’t care about beeminder charges. But I really need to make this work now! So, I thought, if the “stick” doesn’t work, maybe I can make it work with a “carrot”? To activate and involve in my going-to-bed decisions other parts of the brain, that is. The most potentially fun “currency” in which I can reward myself is currently the number of pages of new books that I can grab for my TBR. So I decided that if I get to do well enough on the sleeping goal and make some buffer, I can then ratchet away that buffer and add as many pages to tbr_pur_pages_stale as I ratcheted minutes. For this to work even better, it would be great to be able to use this “carrot” immediately, but of course those additions are subject to acrasia horizon. I will see if this works long-term (in the scale of weeks at least).
There’s nothing to report for the other categories if I remember correctly, so I would like to do the non-regular rubric of reporting on how recently introduced goals are working:
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2025_may_pomos - this is pretty new for me to track exactly pomos, and I have some problems with the idea of imposed ends of the working period. If I am in a working zone, the invitation to stop for a few minutes is really disruptive - it takes a lot of time to get back into the process again. So I usually work for 2-3 pomos straight if it is flowing. Other than that, this is the impulse that my writing projects needed right now, and I am nearly done with the first draft of the first of them, just a few days (with mostly half-rate dates because of the travelling) into the goal.
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lit_anki_rotestock - it was a good idea to introduce a metric supplied by this plugin as an intermediary metric for this. I have already ratcheted a couple of times as I am working through the backlog that I accumulated and want the progress to be “saved” for the future.
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the entire system of metrics for my TBR is working really satisfactorily at the moment. I might tweak something else later but I generally like the state this system of metrics is after all the tweaks a few weeks ago.
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transl_done - this was also a very good small solution for a large problem that was bothering me for a long time. Now I just send +1 through intend every day when there are no new tasks or I have worked on dispatching the new tasks that appeared, - and I no longer ignore these really small, 15-min-max things for weeks!
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birding_2025 - works great and doesn’t seem too demanding, just what I needed.
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Not much to report following all the rubrics, so I will just mention some highlights.
- Still in Serbia; mostly working on my project which is going quite well; also did some good birdwatching this week.
- Forgot to mention last week: I added a jump to photos_remaining to accommodate the tons of photos that I am taking on this trip. But it’s not a defeat - the entire setup that allowed me to go for a few months without these jumps has been working really well for me. The 2024 backlog is now down to the final few hundreds.
- I really want to grab some new books, but a couple of my TBR-related goals are firmly discouraging me from that, and I am abiding for now.
- The setup with pomos for my project that I started in May has been working well. I actually finished one of the manuscripts that are top priority now this week. I don’t really always abide by the pomodoros’ boundaries - e.g. I stand up to grab myself a new tea whenever I want and usually work straight through the breaks because otherwise I am disrupting the flow of thoughts and have trouble focusing back.
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