shanaqui’s Beeminder Journal: 2025

Life
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Well, happy new year and welcome 2025! Time for my first check-in of the year, and thus time to make my sixth Beeminder journal thread.

What’s this?

Each week, I post a summary/reflection on my beeminding from the previous week. I usually post on Friday, though sometimes I’ll post a couple of days earlier or later.

Previous threads:

[Pre-2021] | [2021] | [2022] | [2023] | [2024]

Ground Rules:

Feel free to join in and ask questions, poke me and give me accountability, chip in with your experiences. I’m game. If something’s out of bounds (e.g. because it’s too personal), I won’t be offended, I’ll just say so.

I’m usually very frank about my physical and mental health, particularly the latter. That means I’m usually happy to answer questions that others might consider impertinent or TMI… but I’ll let you know if it crosses the boundary and I don’t want to answer.

Useful things to know:

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Opening thoughts:

Oof, here we are in 2025! I’ve been getting my yearly goals started, kicking up the pace of studying, and all sorts. I’m really looking forward to the weekend.

It was also a near-thing that I didn’t derail on my TBR goal from the books my wife bought me for Christmas. Lisa went nuts on it! But I had successfully planned ahead and the crisis was averted.

Derailments:

  • /tody - I’ve fallen pretty behind on this one over the Christmas period. I have a plan (see new goals) for getting back on track somewhat – and I’m not sure whether I want to keep this goal in its current form. I guess we’ll see how it goes! For now it has some buffer.

New goals:

  • /onechore - This is my first New Month’s Resolution goal for 2025, and is hopefully gonna help me get somewhat back on track with chores. It’s a simple one: do one chore, every day, no matter how busy. That means on a busy day I can pick a small chore, but still, something will get done.
  • /2025backlog - This is a reading goal, but one I haven’t tried in this format before. It’s also my choice for the No Excuses Mode NYR challenge (see the first post for a link to that). I’m not quite sure what the rate should be yet, but I’ve started out with the hope of at least a quarter of the books I read this year (so roughly 100, since I usually read 400 books in a year) being books I already owned before 2025 began. The fine print notes the last unread book bought before the threshold (currently volume 3 of the light novel The Apothecary Diaries, I think), and will be changed if I start that book. That way I have a sort of “bookmark” in my (large) StoryGraph TBR, which displays books added in order. Ideally I’d like to up the rate so it’s more like 200 books, but I’m not sure what’s feasible with my whim-based reading habits, so for a while I’ll just gather data.
  • /2025pages - This is my reading goal for 2025 based on total number of pages read, which is 90,000 pages. That means I’m aiming to average 225 pages per book I read, nudging me in the direction (I hope) of reading some of my longer books, while not precluding reading manga, comics and novellas. I find myself somewhat avoiding books that it feels will take me “a long time” to read, because of my other reading goals nudging me to just finish more books, so basically this goal is part of my checks and balances on prioritising the wrong things.
  • /2025reading - And finally, this is the goal based on the cumulative total number of books I read. This year I’m not making multiple goals at different levels, but just going for the “Savage” goal initially (400 books) and being prepared to drop it back to “Extreme” (365) or normal (300). I read 400 books in 2023 and 2024, so the “Savage” level feels doable now, and having a single goal avoids some of the double-jeopardy situations I was in which weren’t helping.

Changes to existing goals:

  • /2024reading, /2024reading_ex, /2024reading_sav, 2024reading_sprint and /2024reading_pages - All these goals finished on 31st December, and were ultimately successful.
  • /lshtm_wash - I’ve completed a first pass of study on this course, so this goal is now quietly dormant.
  • /lshtm_immunology - I need to get through the whole of this by the end of January, so I decided on a different format for this one. Normally I make my study goals “steppy”, but this one is more standard, set to go at whatever rate gets me to the end by the end of the month. I started with some buffer, though, to give me a bit of wiggle-room as I go.

Closing thoughts:

In some ways I’m feeling like there’s too much going on, in some ways I’m managing more than I was before. As ever, swings and roundabouts I suppose. The only thing for me to keep in mind is that I need to have a think which goals I can definitely keep up while I’m away later in the month, which ones I can’t but have enough buffer already, which ones I can if I plan ahead, and which just need a break. I’m not away until the 22nd, but it’d be nice to be prepared!

I also want to go back to my TBR goal and add #derail tags back to certain datapoints, so I can tell when a peak in the number of books owned was planned in advance or due to a derailment.

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I am also a Tody user and have debated Beeminding it. However:

  1. I am hesitant to have another manual data entry goal.
  2. I still really don’t have it set up well. I have the frequency too high or low on certain chores.
  3. I’m not really sure what to Beemind. How gar Dusty is ahead? Just how many points I got? Do I count what the kids and husband did as well, or just me? (Although my kids are still at a stage where them doing chores still requires some effort from me, even if it’s just reminders.)

I’m curious the particulars of your Tody goal. Right now chore consistency is kind of a mess for me and the kids, and I have a feeling that a well done Beeminder goal could help.

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For me, my Tody goal has always just been “clear the decks on Tody = +1”. So I can’t check it off if there are any chores left to do at the end of the day.

Latterly this has been modified to “all today’s chores done, plus two chores from the backlog” if I’ve got behind, to try and keep it reasonable (it’s amazing how quickly the backlog builds up).

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Boy is that the truth. I often feel like I just want to mark everything in there done one day and start over. I’m now tempted to do this on the 31st and maybe make Tody my resolution for February.

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I need to do a big reset of my tasks too, or maybe just delete everything and start over. Maybe I should join you in February! I know I’m going to be away in the second to last week of January, so it doesn’t really make sense to do it now…

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Opening thoughts:

It’s been an OK week, though I’m not reading as much as I’d like, so I’m losing ground on my books and pages goals for 2025. Not my backlog goal, though! I’m ahead on that. That’s mostly because I don’t have any books bought since the cutoff, yet, so almost anything I choose (except for library books) counts for this goal. Still, it’s good to make progress.

Changes to existing goals:

  • /toberead - As I planned last week, I’ve added in hashtags to distinguish when a peak on this graph was a derail and when it was planned in advance (otherwise, the two situations look the same if there’s a jump up).
  • For my time away from home, I’ve only put breaks in a couple of goals:
    • /weighingin & /dailyweight - Because I’m not toting my smart scale with me.
    • /gotwheels - Ditto my bike.
    • /tody - It’ll be on a break. However, I’m not pausing /onechore, since keeping my living/working space tidy and helping with stuff at my parents’ house should still be possible.
  • /gotwheels - Also getting a break for right now because it isn’t remotely safe to ride. The roads are coated in a thick layer of ice. A thaw should hopefully be coming soon, and I want to test out riding with my new heated cycling gloves (they’re a little big for me), but I can’t say when exactly the road will be safe again – particularly not the cycle paths, which are more isolated.
  • /lshtm_immunology - I ended up removing the buffer on this one, but enabling weekends-off. This way, my rate shouldn’t go over 1/day, but I can take weekends off without worrying.

Closing thoughts:

I think that’s actually it for the week! Nothing else momentous to report. The snow and ice here have been upending a number of plans (like trying to get back to cycling!) but that’s just how it is, gotta roll with it.

For next week, I want to sit down and write up how my studying goal is going for me in the current format, because I didn’t think I’d like it, but it’s certainly getting me through my course content at an acceptable speed!

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