I am currently doing a postdoc in Lithuania, so the idea to learn the language naturally appeared as soon as the plan to come here finalized.
As for the impressions of CEE, I am the wrong person to ask perhaps, as I spent my most formative years in Ukraine before coming to the US for 8 years to do my PhD, so being back in this part of the world simply feels like so much closer to home (culturally and in terms of life infrastructure / urban space).
You speak great English - now I know it might have something to do with your scientific background and time spent in the US - so I took for granted that you’re from the western West.
Thanks for the reply 
good luck with all plans! I appreciate focus on smaller languages.
General impressions
New goals
Completed goals
Derailments
Changes to goals
General impressions
Derailments
New goals
Completed goals
Changes to goals
Interesting. What is the idea or expectation here in the long term?
There are a few intertwined aspects here. First, we obviously weren’t getting anywhere close to enough by the health recommendations, so we are checking the hypothesis that tracking and making sure that we actually consume enough might positively impact daily energy levels. Second, it’s a bit hard for me to internalize the idea that we, humans of a bit different sizes, actually need a different amount of calories, nutrients etc. The idea of “fairness” that I grew up with is that everybody in the family gets an equal portion of everything. So, looking at those different “daily amounts” for each of us and calculating how much more of something each of us needs will hopefully reframe that learned idea. Of course, none of this is directly related to having a beeminder goal. I would say, a beeminder goal is just a cherry on top of a practice that we are currently testing as a shared attempt to implement some behaviour change.
General impressions
Derailments
New goals
Completed goals
Changes to goals
This week went in a haze, as quite soon after returning from Poland I realized I caught some kind of seasonal virus. So I was mostly resting in bed and reading. Good for my reading goals, bad for my work progress (through reading included also some reading for a future chapter for my work project, not only leisure). Got two derailments because of this: one I called non-legit (for physical activity, as the goal is to prioritize doing some activity against busyness/distractions, not to make myself when I feel physically incapable), another one legit (my recently refurbished goal for brushing teeth earlier - I just wasn’t paying attention because of resting in bed, but nothing prevented me physically from doing it, so totally legit).
Okay, that thing from last week turned out not a seasonal virus but something nastier, and unfortunately I had to go on a transatlantic trip for a conference (stressful by itself) while this bug still being at its worst. Ugh. Just returned from there last night, which is why I am reporting for the last 1.5 weeks. (But I feel like I have been firmly recovering for the past few days, phew.)
Most of stuff was paused for the conference, but for the few routine things that weren’t, I did them a bit but let them slide to less buffer, hence the meta goal (which I didn’t calculate for the past few days) is very deeply in the red today. So I will try to do as much as possible for moving it out of the red today and if not, that will be a derailment for meta.
I also let go of my goal for daily protein consumption before the trip, as it was an extra thing to pay attention to in the midst of all the chaos. There was enough buffer to just stop the goal and stop entering data.
General impressions
Okay, back to my structured weekly reports. Yes, it’s just 4 days since the last one, but I need to get back on schedule.
Last few days were mostly dedicated to getting out of the weeds for routine things that were neglected around my illness and the trip (both life- and work-wise).
New goals
Completed goals
Derailments
Changes to goals
I dialed my goals dedicated to learning Lithuanian back up. Several classes were cancelled this month because of the two trips, and it feels. My level is nowhere near the level where you can just not use the language for years and then just open your mouth and speak at the same level of fluency at which you were. We will probably still be cutting down on lessons with our tutor, but we decided that it will be to once-a-week instead of twice-a-week after a while, rather than stopping them at all. So I dialed back up the goal for total amount of time spending on learning Lithuanian as well as restarted the goal, which previously reached its end date, for going through lesson notes and homework corrections to create Anki cards.
In spring, I will be doing a short-term fellowship in Germany, so I thought I might as well undust my German ahead of that. I mean, I already have a goal for that but it’s been at a very low supporting rate of 6 minutes/day for the past few years. And if I decided to meet that requirement with Duolingo, it was basically of no use. (I finished the German course in Duolingo a long time ago, their “revision” exercises seem of very little use at my level.) So, upping that to 2 hours/week and no Duolingo. Mostly YouTube videos, I guess. If anyone has any suggestions of YouTube channels with specifically the German language spoken in Bavaria, that would be most welcome advice!
General impressions
New goals
Completed goals
Derailments
meta - partly due to the fact that I raised the slopes for both Lithuanian and German, as described last week (max future slope is what defines a goal’s contribution to meta, so that was an immediate hit). But I would give myself a couple days to catch up if it were just that; but I am just not able to handle the entire amount of work that all goals require of me.
focused_work_early - same reason of general exhaustion plus combining work with other events/errands
Changes to goals
General impressions
It looks like I got a job offer? On the first attempt, without a gap between my current post-doc and that position? (Does that even still happen? Am I selling myself too low?) I am pretty sure it can still fall through because of the paperwork, but even just being selected is nice.
Arrived to Serbia for the next few weeks. I am so ready for this period of nomadic life to be over, hopefully, thanks to 
. Serbia is nice, and I am already indulging in some of the foods that I usually enjoy when I am here, but is being able to stay at one place for longer than a month too much to ask?
I made breaks for the day of travelling (yesterday) and for the day of settling in (today), but again forgot that the day before travelling is usually also hardly the best time to do all the routine things, especially if packing cannot be left for the morning before the flight. Maybe I’ll remember one day.
New goals
Completed goals
Derailments
Changes to goals
restarted sleep_by_12, as I usually do when I am solo travelling;
finally restarted both my gmail-fewer goals (for total and for read messages) today - I first tried after coming back from the conference a few weeks ago but it was too daunting with everything that was received in the meantime and I still needed a lot of stuff piling in mail for post-travel paperwork. I thought I would restart and derail and start from there but I actually got back under the previously set lines, since I could finally archive some of the things that were piling there for future attention;
added some future jumps to my TBR goals (owned and total), as I am planning to gift myself some books for the upcoming holidays; I am still very unsatisfied how the goal for the owned books looks like - will need to think of a different metric to track, I guess.
UPD:
And as an action addressing the need outlined in the last point, I created a new goal that will require of me to read on average 20 pages a day from the books I own. I have previously tried adding deadlines to the owned books, to have them appear in the list showing how much I need to read by a certain date, together with the library copies and ARCs, but it always felt wrong, because I could feel the lack of real deadline behind the practice. So back to tracking them separately.The goal will be fed by the same script that is feeding all my tbr-related goals, in such a way that I can read from any of the books in the list to fulfill the requirement.
General impressions
New goals
Completed goals
Derailments
meta - everything is just too overwhelming
brushing teeth by noon - somehow blanked out on this one day
Changes to goals
a few goals that I have from before the standard end day of the goal became the year 2099, which are set to end every year, informed me on their upcoming expiration, so that was a good incentive to reevaluate the rates for the next period. E.g. I dialed my German practice goal back down, as I am not going to that fellowship in Germany in the nearest future anymore; dialed yoga from 3 to 4 times a week, etc. A more thorough revision of the rates is upcoming, as I am planning to look back at this year and adjust.
made a pause in my iron supplements goal, as I don’t like the supplements that I have now (new ones since about a month ago) and want to take a break until I find a different form at a pharmacy.
General impressions
New goals
Completed goals
Derailments
Changes to goals
This was the first year that I decided to participate in the monthly resolutions challenge. That was a fun way to try out some things for just a month. Of the 12 monthly goals, there were a few designed to last for a month or several - for a specific deadline; some were things I could do indefinitely but ended up deciding I don’t need to, and 5 were something I have kept for the remainder of the year. Specifically:
January 
submitting checklists to eBird, to discourage long pauses when I am not on exciting trips — did for the entire year, was fun and not too overwhelming (250 checklists in total!); still deciding if I want to continue next year
February 
7 daily portions of fresh fruit and vegetables — saw I can do this easily and probably do on most days by myself, so discontinued to avoid the burden of logging. Similarly, in November /
I tracked the amount of consumed protein — while this worked on practice, I stopped early to avoid the overwhelm of logging during trips.
March whittle down for total pages on my (purchased, ARCs and library copies) TBR, with exponential increase of weight as a book “ages” — kept a version of this for the entire year, will continue; this was pretty effective for restricting my uncontrollable book acquisition and for encouraging tackling the older ones. In June I added a do-more for pages read pulled from storygraph, to have an idea of having done something when the previous progress is instantly negated by the new additions; also a keeper.
April May July were all versions of goals focused on writing drafts of certain deliverables for my postdoc project — those based on pomodoros, with a list of caveats for what counts, ended up the most effective; will repeat as needed
August regular checks if anything in (non-primary, university assigned) email needs attention — worked well to reduce the anxiety that I might have missed something; will use the strategy again in the future
September do-less on requesting new ARCs — worked for the month, the effect didn’t stick
October the trial run for what will be my next yearly challenge, reading books from countries I haven’t previously read anything from — I like how this has been going, I am discovering so many interesting things, definitely will do the entire challenge now
December drafted posts for year-summaries on birding and reading — generally, worked, but I assumed I will have three shorter summaries, while I ended up writing two longer ones, never getting to any summary for my beeminding for this thread.
Congrats on the job offer!
A bit late with the weekly update, as I travelled Serbia → Poland → Ukraine over the weekend. I paused all relevant goals for the trip, so that I am not obliged to produce some datapoints e.g. during a power outage (but luckily, we haven’t had any yet over these two days where I am staying, though some were scheduled — yay to Ukrainian energy experts). I am now treating this as an experiment: how much will I actually do of those things that I genuinely believe I ought to be doing (otherwise I wouldn’t have the goals for that) when there’s no pressure. Some goals are still running though, like everything where the road is built from code (TBR-related), and small things where only ~weekly input is necessary.
Other “news”:
This has been a pretty productive week. Not much is happening beeminder-wise, as most of my goals are paused, but I have been doing surprisingly a lot even for those goals, though they are not pushing me to do.
I had a dream today: I was on a space station and there were some books I wanted to read there, so I bought some to take home. And then it dawned on me (in the dream): but I haven’t checked whether this fits to my TBR goals! Probably not! I’ll derail now! It’s like going full-mode panic after inadvertently eating something with gluten in a dream! Haven’t had those for beeminder goals yet.
Since my previous update, there has been some more travelling between multiple countries — so there are continued breaks in many goals of mine that demand time / being at home. On the other hand, I have ratcheted a few of those where I mostly added breaks for the scenario that I wouldn’t have power/internet access while I was in Ukraine, but I have been doing those anyway — those goals are now ratcheted. There has also been tremendous progress toward this next period in my life, so hopefully I will be able to reevaluate existing goals and set up new routines soon. For now, finally in Vilnius for a few days, catching up on stuff.
I went systematically through all of my goals and moved/cut some of the buffers that I previously added as a precaution but didn’t need all of it. This week many things will be on breaks again, as I need to travel and I don’t even know which day. (Ugh, transitioning between positions is hard; plus I don’t even have a break between them, I have an overlap, so no rest from having to do the work.) Goals that were dedicated to my current/previous position (like check_work_email) are set to end this week. Might reuse the same goal later, though, once I have a new work email.
Derailed on teeth_hours one of the days I didn’t need to be out anywhere and simply blanked on this until after the cut-off.
A new goal this week - testing the setup now for this to be my monthly for February: tbr_started_whittle. The background is that I start a book, even get well into it, but them I get distracted and move on to something else. Well, this goal measures the sum of percentages remaining in everything that is “currently reading” (past 15% - I often do sample things like ARCs, just to get an idea, so just looking at a few initial pages doesn’t overburden the goal immediately). I will be actively whittling this down by finishing the ones I have in progress until the end of February, and then keeping the total under the flat line at the level of 5 (=an equivalent of 5 full books). Potentially should be good not only to make me finish started books, but also to direct my attention to the need to decide that I want to DNF something.
