Some less structured impressions this week. It was the week of visiting a conference/workshop event in Denmark for which I have been preparing for a while now. (Actually writing this on a train back to CPH airport 
). I think I was able to leave a good impression about myself, and as an early career scholar I think these initial events in the status of my own full-ass PhD rather than a student are very important. Here are some of the ways how beeminder helped me get ready for this event.
- The paper that I presented at this workshop is part of my current post-doc research project, so it was the main focus of my daily working hours on the project between approximately early March and mid-May. I beemind that with two goals: total time on project and tagtime pings with an elaborate system that nudges me to work earlier in the day.
- It is always hard for me to switch from the stage of “I need to read more secondary lit on the sub-topic for this chapter/paper” to “I can start writing the chapter/paper”. So, in April I tried to add a goal with the total number of words in the draft, but it failed badly. (It was a bad setup: instead of counting the number of the days that I am planning to actually work on the thing and calculating the real daily rate that won’t get wonky around weekends off and vacations, I just made a total-by-the-end of the month goal, with the idea that the buffer from what I wrote in March will allow me to quickly get done another thing, then a flat spot for a week of vacation was introduced and everything went awry. In short: don’t do that (advice to future-me, obviously; it works for you, by all means, do that)) In May, I added another auxiliary goal that tracked pomos on just this sub-task of the project, so that I couldn’t procrastinate within time-on-project by continuing to read around more, and it pretty much worked.
- After I submitted the paper mid-May, everyone’s papers were pre-circulated in the beginning of the previous week. I made a short-term goal to track my progress through them. Mostly to have a nice graphic representation that I am doing okay and getting through them in a timely manner, not that I was ever in a real danger of derailing on that.
During the workshop, I have discussed with some colleagues a couple of potential ideas for future collaboration - like co-authoring something together when I saw that we have some interesting mutually enriching material and disciplinary background. From past experience, I know that I tend not to follow up on some ideas like that once I get back to my routines after a conference. So I am wondering if I should make a goal for that, so that I am actually nudged to return to any of these ideas later. (Especially since usually everybody is really packed with deadlines and plans for the nearest future when such potential ideas of collaboration are discussed and their modus is always “well, sometime later, much much later, obviously”.) I will probably try to look into the idea of nebulous beeminding for that and set something up soon. Anybody reading this, you may hold me accountable by requesting 10 Eur (Paypal I assume) to the first person to comment about that - if I haven’t reported creating a goal for the above purpose by the end of two weeks from now (that is, in two weekly reports).
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This past week I came to the US where I will be looking at things in a library for approximately a month. It was, expectedly, hectic around the travel (a 24-hour-long “awake day”, and I wasn’t even at my final destination after that), jetlag, settling in into the work routines, and catching up with people I am staying with and some other friends. Despite my best effort to make sure I have breaks around the travel time, I still derailed (claimed non-legit) for three goals because I missed the moment when I should have changed the time zone, behind all the lack of sleep and a power outage upon my arrival on top of everything.
Changes:
- my sleep_ealier goal is on again, and I upped the rate to enforce an average bedtime of 10pm. I am hoping to put my jetlag to some use in this way, by saving a bit of the time difference and being more productive in the mornings.
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General impressions
- This week I was mostly working like crazy to finish a manuscript for the submission deadline of July 1. And it’s ready, pending the last sanity-check reread tomorrow. And I actually moderately like how it looks, especially given that I wrote it from scratch over the past 1.5 months, which I didn’t even dedicate to it fully, as these 1.5 months included a conference/workshop and travel around it. So, there’s a reason to commend myself for finishing this after all, once I submit it tomorrow. Which brings me to…
Completed goals
- In the last days of April, I created a goal to make sure that I work on the most urgent aspects of my project, and not just “on the project” in general. At that point, it included finishing the half-written paper for the workshop and writing from scratch this one that I am finishing these days. I will still be doing the final checks for the submission tomorrow, but I am already reporting this as “completed” because I already overshot the initial goal by 26 pomos over the marathon-like past few days. I could say I underestimated the amount of time needed to actually finish these two things by 10-15%, but a more likely explanation is that any work can fit into any available amount of time - so while the daily pomos helped me make sure I sit to work on these things regularly, the speed with which anything is accomplished is more dictated by the external idea of urgency. So I could have set a higher rate from the beginning but would still need to pull an all-weekender to finalize the thing, just after having spent more time on that in total. Crazy how irrational our brains are. I liked the general idea; will probably create another goal like that for the next portion of most urgent things.
UPD:
So, in the end, I spent 18% more time on the defined tasks than I guesstimated when I created this goal with 6 pomos/workday two months ago. A pretty close guesstimate, I would say, though, as all of this “overtime” happened throughout the final three days before the deadline, I still stay with the interpretation above that any work tends to occupy all the time set aside for it and a bit more. /End UPD
New goals
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future_papers - as I described my intention a couple of weeks ago, I created this goal that works on the principles of nebulous beeminding. This goal just receives the word count from a google doc where I describe a couple of ideas for potential co-authored papers that I had during the workshop. I first set the rate to make sure I actually write down the ideas over the few next days, and when I jotted down everything I wanted, I adjusted the rate so that the goal with gently nudge me to look at this file again in a month. The idea is just to have one place where these “not right now” ideas are written down so that they are not forgotten, and that I have to look at them once in a while so that the brain will connect the dots if I encounter an appropriate call for papers or something. [My promise to send money to the first person to call me out on not creating this goal within two weeks’ time is thus voided, because I have created it in time and am reporting the fact within two weekly reports.]
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photos_2025_1 - a whittle-down goal, like I did with the isolated photos backlog from 2024 but for the first half of the 2025. The thing is, I haven’t even downloaded all of the photos from June yet. So I set up this goal with the thought that I will have to download the remaining ones during the week of “feet-wetting” period, when I can derail for free. To add the urgency to the need to download them after all.
Derailments
Changes to goals
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I’m late with the update this week, as I traveled back to Europe over the weekend and am still trying to switch my head back on in the correct time zone
So the previous week was mostly about wrapping up things around my stay in Illinois.
There isn’t that much to report. I made sure I have breaks for all goals so that I don’t have to think about them when travelling - but derailed on my mailbox goal because I forgot this one will still require attention. I decided to consider it legit, because I should have been paying more attention, and if I had I totally had the capacity to open my laptop and delete those emails while waiting at the airport.
I also successfully finished the short-term goal that I announced last week. I have been really liking the idea of short-term goals lately, now that I have a mechanism to distinguish between goals that count for meta (=anything below 10 days is actionable but can slip closer to red if needed, I care about long-term habit more than about doing it on a specific day) and those that don’t (=often supposed to be in red-orange daily, to enforce considerable daily input) - it makes sense to create such goals for short-term commitments like reading something for an event or to provide comments on a longer piece.
UPD: Yes, and my sleep_earlier goal has ended, as planned, with this trip ending, until my next solo trip when I will resurrect it from the archive. Takeaway from the latest run: better to keep it at reasonable bedtime, so that I can gain some buffer that will be ratcheted out (as a bonus to my pages goal, as described a few months ago) than to impose a stricter earlier bedtime that will be only stress and no fun.
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General impressions
- I think I am more or less settled in the correct time zone by now. It’s been a mostly calm week, with a lot of quality research time for the next thing I will writing for my project.
New goals
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lith_read - I decided I might be ready to try a real-life book as part of my Lithuanian language acquisition journey, so I grabbed one that looked like an appropriate level from a children’s lit section. This goal is to make sure I don’t forget to read it little by little. 2 pages/days so far but I might up that, will see how it goes.
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check_work_email - to check work mailbox on workdays; I have been really ignoring that since my mail app stopped working a few weeks ago, and then I get anxious as I realize I haven’t checked it for a while.
Completed goals
Derailments
- tbr_pur_pages_stale (the goal with the total of pages on my TBR, accounted for time since adding). I was not sure whether this counts as a legit or non-legit. Technically, I derailed because I added a bunch of work-related titles that I have recently scanned for myself, so it should have been non-legit. Initially I hoped to gradually make space for these extra pages under the current road and made some good progress, but then I started filling in that gap with other random new picks. I realized that I would never make enough space to add those scanned work-related books under the road, so added them all and “uncled” it - which makes it legit automatically. Well, let’s say that was because of those random titles, a derailment because of those would be clearly a legit derailment.
But this looks pretty discouraging after the derailment, might decide to zoom in to just the final section and start from there again.
Changes to goals
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There isn’t much to report this week, so I’ll go over the goals that I have introduced recently-ish and comment on how it has been going.
- fieldwork (the goal to read a specific edited volume for a conference discussion) - it’s satisfying to see how I am ahead of the schedule, but I have neglected some other aspects of the project now that I can be doing this and this counts. Ugh.
- lith_read (the goal for reading a children’s book as part of learning Lithuanian) - works well. Could have made the rate steeper but it’s nice like this and not too overwhelming. Pausing this goal now that I am leaving home for a month - I have this book on paper and don’t want to take it with me.
- check_work_email - I have been actually checking that mailbox every workday now - works!
- intend_reviews - it has been working okay, though the buffer that I have intentionally created on this goal lets me postpone the weekly reviews until a few days into the next week. A point of improvement of the workflow might be to pair those reviews with the weekly posts here in terms of on which day they are “due”. It seems logical to think of week’s impressions together for both places.
- 2025_july_pomos - it has been mostly working well, though maybe I have allowed too many of different activities to “count” this time over, so I am procrastinating from specifically writing the papers again. Like I said above, I have been recently mostly occupying myself with the reading of the book for a discussion, while not writing the paper for an even earlier conference. Moving on from researching to writing is the most procrastinated-on aspect of my activity; this goal was supposed to help with that, and the current setup seems to bee too loose to actually help.
- future_papers (the goal to nebulously beemind ideas about some future article ideas) - it had reminded about itself a couple of times now, so I have gone back to the file and added some further elaborations on what those papers could be about.
- photos_2025_1 - I am not really doing too much for this goal. Maybe should up the rate for it to demand my attention more often
- tbr_storygraph_pages - it’s actually very satisfying. Because other TBR-related goals are all backlog-based, they do not really show progress when I have finished something and then started a new one. Having this one with total pages read shows that something is happening there behind the totals that fluctuate back to the same numbers.
And that’s it since the previous review like this in May. No additional impressions on the goals that were “new” at that point. I also haven’t been mentioning here the goals that I have started and already finished by this point. I have done a few, mostly to read something that isn’t a regular book, can’t be done in one sitting, and needs to be finished within a time frame. Will definitely continue with those - I like how it helps me see the progress.
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This week I have arrived to Sakartvelo/Georgia, where I will be combining some usual remote work with sightseeing. So I have added some breaks for the more time-consuming goals. I believe I have “accumulated vacation time” of two weeks that I can use but it will most likely be a combination of work and vacation, not strict not-working for two weeks.
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Last week was a continuation of a very nice and birding-rich road trip through Georgia. Most routine things were on a break, but I didn’t really align the breaks correctly for them to work correctly for meta. So I will still have to reassess the actual situation with some goals and some derailments will follow, but that I will know for sure later
Also decided to extend my stay in Georgia for another few weeks (just remote working on my project but in a warmer climate) - so I am extending the breaks for things that I cannot do until I return to Vilnius - like reading the book I have on paper.
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What is the reason to learn Lithuanian? (Which is a nice thing to do btw). Is there anything surprising for you in Central/Eastern Europe?
Sorry I didn’t read all the thread, just curious.
Further work on the ms only if the deadline for the submission will be set earlier than Jan 1. 
(I received comments to my draft, so I technically could work on the revisions, but the collection proposal is still under review, so there has been no deadline provided for participants)
I didn’t expect I will get it back for revision within this quarter, as I only submitted the first version by July 1, but I also counted the work on “UkrAm ms” once it was returned to me on Aug 31 with a Sep 15 deadline.