Scarabaea's beeminder journal

Life
82

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).

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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 :slight_smile: good luck with all plans! I appreciate focus on smaller languages.

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General impressions

  • the week was mostly defined by a virtual conference and a knitting project that I distracted myself with

New goals

  • None this week

Completed goals

  • None this week.

Derailments

  • tbr_total - didn’t really read as much this week because of the things mentioned above, so I let this derail, for an n-th time at this level already

Changes to goals

  • In a week, I’ll tag along with my husband on a trip to Poland, giving myself one of my vacation weeks, so I added breaks in work-related goals and also those that depend on me being at home.
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General impressions

  • pretty productive week work-wise, ending in flying to Poland for the next week. I am literally at the layover airport right now, having missed the original short connection (but we were rebooked for a later flight tonight, so it’s all fine, phew)

Derailments

  • tbr_total - again, because I want new books more often that I finish them :confused:
  • teeth_by_noon - so, this goal has been set up in a way that I get +1 if it’s before 12 or +0.5 if it’s after 12 p.m. but still before lunch. (With something like 0.8 required daily.) This setup didn’t in any way actually reward or encourage brushing my teeth even earlier; then I thought I might as well do that after coffee+snack at 11:30-ish, then I would get distracted, then it’s already past noon… well, this pattern has been repeating too frequently lately, so after another derailment I decided to do something new to the same end :down_arrow:

New goals

  • teeth_hours - this a do-less goal where I enter the actual time of the day when I brush my teeth for the first time in the day. I have been wary of do-less goals from my initial experience with them in my early days with beeminder and learned to express anything in terms of do-more instead - but they are much more sophisticated now and I have been recently re-discovering their hidden potential. So, the setting is currently set to 12 daily, with a maximum amount of buffer allowed 15, so I can accumulate some buffer if I actually make a habit not to postpone brushing to “after coffee at 11:30”. So far, so good! Might be the effect of a fresh-shiny goal, might be actually a better setup.
  • protein - my monthly goal for November. My husband and I have been trying to track the amount of protein we consume for a few days now, with Cronometer, so when I had proof this is actually doable, decided I could as well make this goal.

Completed goals

  • oct2025_draft - that was a draft of a conference paper that I am about to send out to the discussant in a couple of days. Still editing/polishing it, but I am already well past the initial word count and I am done with the text structurally (I just prolonged the lifetime of the goal, just for it to continue pulling word counts, to see how much longer the draft will be eventually after the polishing and adding all supporting quotes). Did it with google docs this time, and it seems to be the first time, I think, for a word-count-based goal to ever properly work for me. Will just post this here to remind myself what an uneven process this is:
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Changes to goals

  • Apart from the changes around intensive travelling this month, it looks like we will be cutting on our Lithuanian classes (structured classes with our wonderful tutor, that is), so I am dialing down the goal for total time and letting stop the goal dedicated to going through lesson notes and making anki cards from them. Will sub these activities with more of self-driven activities (reading, videos, revising words), which is already partly covered by dedicated goals, but eventually, I might create additional ones. But I will think about that more properly in the end of November, it’s just too chaotic right now with all other things planned.
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Interesting. What is the idea or expectation here in the long term?

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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.

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General impressions

  • Spent the week in Krakow, semi-vacationing (because I am owe myself some vacation time), semi-working (because deadlines).

Derailments

  • None this week

New goals

  • None this week

Completed goals

  • None this week

Changes to goals

  • I am still struggling with properly managing my TBR - and I want to read those books that I have with me for good (own a copy or have scanned a library copy for future use), but as those come without a deadline, they are the most naturally neglected ones (as opposed to ARCs and library copies). So far, I have been mostly managing this aspect of TBR by just reducing the total using a whittle-down goal. Result: seemingly an effective one (down from 30+ to ~20), but… the books I am left with are ~400 pages long. That is, I have been selectively reading the shortest ones when I saw I have a -1 on this goal in a couple of days. Not feasible anymore with the remaining ones. Maybe I should create another goal for pages, to enforce N pages per day, but so far I am overwhelmed enough by other aspects of my reading goals, so I will be just dialing down this goal from having to do a -1 every 15 days to every 20 days. (It’s not that I read only so seldom - it’s that I purchase new ones too frequently.)
  • Some elaborate breaks for conference travel next week. Elaborate, because some goals need to be on a break for the entire week (conference + trans-Atlantic travel), while other ones should be sustained during the conference (minor life-supporting habits like vitamin intake) and absolutely nothing should have a chance to be due on the day when I will be flying and by the time I arrive in the US and open my computer, beeminder will consider it past midnight already. And still, I am sure I messed up something and I will have some goals like that. (Having some checkmarks in the breaks interface would really help.) Additional problem: the goals whose road is created from a script cannot have pre-entered breaks, they will be overwritten, so despite “taking care” of the breaks, I will still have to make sure to gain enough buffer on those goals.
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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).

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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.

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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

  • 2025_summary_drafts - this will be my monthly goal for December. I usually want to write some summarizing posts for my blog(s) about what happened during the year on topics such as birding, books read etc., but the pressure to do that exactly in the last days of December sometimes adds to the end-of-the-year overwhelm to the extent that last year, for example, I didn’t even do the post overviewing my favorites from 150+ books read during 2024. I looked at a few such summary posts over the past couple of years that I actually did and estimated the total length I might want to write based on that. So, now this goal will make me contribute little by little throughout December, so by the last days of the month and year I will have everything ready, adjust any relevant numbers, and just post. I am thinking of three topics: birding, reading and - a new one - any insights on my beeminder goals for this journal.

Completed goals

  • None this week

Derailments

  • None this week

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!

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General impressions

  • I am thoroughly exhausted from planning all the plans plus attempting to do the regular amount of substantive work plus not having fully recovered yet.

New goals

  • None this week

Completed goals

  • None this week

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

  • breaks for the travel day next Saturday across all the goals that are within the buffer
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