I’m not overall feeling very chipper or anything, and I still need to crunch through edits and formatting them for submission… but progress has been made, so let’s take a moment to celebrate that.
Derailments:
/2025pages & /2025reading - These are my goals for reading a certain number of books/certain number of pages this year. I’d been keeping up, mostly by reading manga, but last night I was so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I let it go.
My assignments all got turned in on time! My brain is mush.
Derailments:
/yoghurts - I’m getting really bad at prioritising this, sigh.
Changes to existing goals:
/steps - I’ve revised the target down for now, due to a) reality and b) some changes to how Oura tracks steps, which they’ve warned will generally reduce the number recorded. I want to work back up, though!
/libraryfeb12 - I had to return the books to the library for various reasons, so I’m archiving this experimental goal for now.
/graduatepls - Got me to finish all my assignments, now archived.
Closing thoughts:
Did I mention my brain is mush? Between that and moving, nothing revolutionary is happening around here!
Things are looking up! OK, I’m still in the middle of trying to move, and my exams aren’t that far away, but I’m getting back to an even keel and a bit of a routine on the daily stuff… and some of my Beeminder goals are being very well managed because my dad won’t rest until I’ve eaten three meals a day and hydrated properly.
New goals:
/bedtime - I know, I know, a very classic Beeminder goal! I’m surprised I’ve never used this goalname before. In any case, given that I’m staying with my parents and sister, and given that the four of us are night owls, my bedtime habits are slipping. This goal is a 5/week rate goal for getting into bed by 1am, reported the following day.
I’ve decided that it counts as long as I get into bed, even if I then read for a while, because reading to wind down is good for me. Plus, trying to beemind actually sleeping is trickier, since then you punish yourself if you can’t sleep.
This is my New Month’s Resolution goal for May!
Closing thoughts:
Possibly I need to create a studying goal, but I’ve been resolutely not thinking about that for a couple of weeks while I chill out. By the end of next week, I should come up with something.
Oof, I wasn’t very well this week and it put a bit of a damper on my study plans – but as promised, I have got started with studying and come up with a goal, which I’ve just created. More on that below!
Derailments:
/steamdeck - This slipped as a priority, for good reasons, and I wasn’t able to keep up with it until the break discussed below kicked in.
/snackattack - The profiteroles Dad bought for me needed eating or they’d have gone off! That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
New goals:
/studyup - Here’s my study goal, for doing 3 past paper questions per week each week until the first exam.
Changes to existing goals:
/steamdeck - I’ve put a solid break on this through the end of my exams, just because studying is going to take up a lot of the spare time that I use for playing games other than FFXIV. It’s not a priority for the moment.
Closing thoughts:
I need to have a look for other goals that maybe aren’t a good priority at the moment – I’ll try to do that by this time next week!
Not an awful week, since not a lot was going on. Some positive developments on the housing front… let’s see how all that goes.
Derailments:
/steps - With the more conservative step counting + relative inactivity due to circumstances and sickness, I ended up derailing on my steps goal. I need to consider reducing the rate again for now to something realistic…
/bedtime - I didn’t waaaaanna go to bed. Also I miscalculated.
Closing thoughts:
Meh… nothing much to report at the moment. I identified a couple of goals I might want to put breaks on/dial down over my exam period, but I haven’t quite decided yet. I guess I’ll try to decide by next week, because my exams are coming ever closer!
My exams are creeping closer, and we’re almost confirmed about a new house to move to, so… aaaah!
Derailments:
/bedtime - I ended up pressing the uncle button on this, so I nearly forgot to include it here because you don’t get an email for those. But yeah, I’ve been bad about going to bed lately, lots of revenge bedtime procrastination, alas.
Changes to existing goals:
/steps and /inactive - Both of these goals got dialled down rates for a bit while I get through the pre-exam and exam period. A little activity is good, but my exams take eight hours each, and there’s a lot less time for moving around, alas.
/bicolorgemstones - This goal was to help me get a certain mount in FFXIV that takes a lot of work (first you do FATEs to earn bicolor gemstones, then you convert them into vouchers; once you have 500 vouchers, you can exchange them for a token, which you then go somewhere else to exchange for the mount). I finished my first target on this goal, archived it, and then restarted it to work towards getting the second mount! Here’s the “photo” evidence of my new sugarglider-inspired mount.
Folks might be pleased to know that (thank you, Beeminder) I got great grades in my assignments, with the top possible grade in two of them, and a very good grade in the other.
First exam on Monday!
Derailments:
/dailyweight - I’m not entirely sure what happened here, to be honest. My weight had been creeping up for a bit, despite arguably better eating habits. In the end I conclude it’s probably a stress + hormone thing, and maybe my anxiety medication too. Anyway, I knew I wasn’t going to weigh in lower during the course of the day, so I hit the uncle button and derailed right away.
Changes to existing goals:
I’ve added three days of break to some work-related goals because my exams take 6-10 hours each (in my experience, closer to 10) and I know I won’t work for those days.
Closing thoughts:
Just gotta get through the exams. Just gotta get through the exams. Just gotta get through the exams…
Though I did want to talk a bit about the new fine print I put on one of my goals to define it a bit more! So maybe I’ll add a section about that…
New goals:
/showerbyten - A replacement for my “bedtime” goal below – the thing that most often stops me being ready for bed on time is the need to go and shower etc etc. I usually shower and brush my teeth right before bed, so okay, what if I’ve already done it? So we’ll see how this goes.
Changes to existing goals:
/bedtime - This was a New Month Resolution experiment and I don’t think it worked well, even though I kept up with it. Not the right lever to pull.
Musing on fine print:
I have a few goals which all work synergistically toward the same end: stop my backlog of owned and unread books growing exponentially. In theory the goal is to reduce the backlog, but I’m not super worried about that in and of itself – I’m more worried about all the great books I already have that I’m not reading.
So I have /toberead (overall backlog) pushing me to work on my owned-unread books backlog, /2025books (books bought in 2025 and not yet read) keeping me reading what I buy fairly quickly, and /2025backlog (books read that I owned before 2025) all pushing me to read older books and not buy more new books than I can sensibly read. It’s a bit like a very elaborate version of Danny’s “isolate the backlog” strategies.
The problem was that this weekend I had a book-buying spree that I was pretty sure had the potential to derail me on /2025books, and I felt like I was maybe cheating in not cataloguing it right away (even though I never do). So me and my wife worked out some fine print for it, which is public so you can check it out there, based on what I actually do when the goal doesn’t exist vs what we think would be actually self-defeating behaviour.
Exams over! Moving house should be about to kick up a gear, so I might end up making a goal or two for that, but right now I’m not sure what I should set up.
Derailments:
/serialreader - I kept stubbornly not putting breaks on my goals despite my exams, and it bit me.
/showerbyten - Essentially timeblindness here, I really seem to have lost my sense of time at the moment.
New goals:
/post-exam-backlog - Oh look, it’s an email backlog goal. Just my personal email, of course – the inboxes I manage never get like this, even if I have to enlist my team to assist.
For now, it’s recovery mode! Some stuff like the email backlog goal for reducing the general overwhelm, but mostly just… trying to get back to an even keel.
In about 10 hours, I should be going to pick up the keys to the new house, provided the landlord’s also signed everything etc etc, which I think he has. Quite a bit of time today was spent clearing out the attic of the flat, which was hot and thirsty work in this weather, but didn’t take too long. The rest is going to take, ahem, a little longer.
I probably won’t make a Beeminder goal for it all because it’s very stop and start depending on quotes from cleaners and movers and so on, but I guess I’ll keep an eye on that!
Derailments:
/snackattack - I can’t actually remember how this happened. I think I was just peckish.
/2025reading - I needed a break on this, to be honest, so I let it derail to get a break kicked in. I’m going to need to catch up somehow if I want to reach the original goal, but there’s plenty of time.
/morningreading - Just not working well, despite being a nice idea.
New goals:
/importbacklog - With the impending demise of Pocket, I’ve transitioned to Readwise Reader, but I want to organise and tag stuff a lot better than I did in Pocket. I even pulled everything I previously archived out of archive, because I want to do things differently all round. This goal is poking me to work on organising stuff and getting through that backlog. Allegedly this rate will get everything organised by mid-September, but I’d like to go faster than that if I can, so will probably turn on autoratchet.
Changes to existing goals:
/morningreading - As above, found this goal just isn’t working well – I don’t always feel like reading first thing, or e.g. if I’m reading non-fiction, am too sleepy still to focus on it. There’s some kind of goal somewhere that will stop me starting the day by plunging straight into email and the news, but this isn’t a good answer, alas.
/steps - Turned down the rate for now as the ring just isn’t picking up as many steps when I’m doing exactly the same stuff.
Lots of goals got a two-day break (and I worked ahead a bunch) in order for me to do almost nothing this weekend and see what I do without plans or lists or goals I have to complete. I’m curious if I’ll find that more restful – or possibly way less restful. I’d like to find out.
Closing thoughts:
I’m doing a bunch of stuff at the moment to transition away from free services to paid ones, mostly because “free” usually means I’m the product in some way, but also partly because services that are useful should probably be paid for. There might be another goal or two in that somewhere, once I’ve e.g. set up my Proton account and started forwarding mail there – something about changing the email address on various accounts and so on? Not sure if it will be beemindable, but it’s in the air.
I’m also using Readwise Reader to follow other people’s blogs, though for now I’m finding the feed a bit overwhelming with everything else I’m doing. In the end, though, some kind of goal for that…? We’ll see!
Slowly stuff progresses with getting moved into the new house, though we won’t have movers until 5th July. So, we’ll see how that all goes…
In the meantime, there’s not a lot to report here. I enjoyed my almost goal-free weekend quite a bit, so I’ve enabled weekends-off on a few more goals, or worked ahead on others. It won’t always be possible to have a totally unscripted weekend, of course, but I think it did help to aim for it.
Derailments:
/yoghurts - I really didn’t want to eat yoghurt that day, ahaha. However, I did find that when it was at $30 if I failed, it felt too pressurey, so I dropped the pledge down to $10 and promptly forgot to cap it, so I have to do that again.
Closing thoughts:
Self, remember to check you’ve capped your /yoghurts goal, this time next week!
I’ve been having some annoying revelations about my current need to preserve a day or two per week where I don’t have anything I absolutely have to do… and how my experiments with it actually seem to show I achieve a lot more in total when I do that than I did when I had endless to-do lists and infinite Beeminder goals every day.
I think there’s a balance to strike – I don’t think having to-do lists or Beeminder goals is inherently bad. What’s been going well is having my work week, with Beeminder goals and to-do lists in Amazing Marvin as usual, and then having a weekend of unscripted time. I still get stuff done in the unscripted time – that’s when I conquered my inbox backlog, totally without needing to do it then for any reason – but I don’t have to. Then I get back to my structure and to-do lists and that’s really nice too, after the break.
So I’m reorganising my goals a bit to recognise that revelation, and the fact that this year has ended up a lot busier than I expected with a bunch of life changes and milestones (moving, bereavement, and graduation).
Derailments:
/snackattack - My normal schedule is all messed up, I’m eating at really weird hours. Oh well.
New goals:
/passwordchanger - Due to a couple of my passwords being found in a leak online, and also wanting to change my email address, it’s an excellent moment to go through everything, change passwords, delete accounts, add 2FA to accounts that didn’t always allow 2FA, etc. I’ve got this on 10/day with weekends off, just to avoid overwhelm. It should take me ~40 work days to get through all of them at that pace, so ~4 weeks.
/checkfeeds - I’ve started using Readwise Reader to follow feeds as well as to replace Pocket, but that means I need to commence a habit of actually checking it. This is set to 1/day, with weekends off.
Changes to existing goals:
/reachout - This is my goal for chatting to friends more regularly, and I’m lowering the rate a bit because a couple of my friends are busier at the moment, so we’re having slower, more asynchronous conversations, and there isn’t always something to respond to or a conversation to restart.
/2025reading - I’ve lowered the target number of books to 300. I hope to put it back up if I get ahead again, at least to 350, but right now I could do without feeling like my hobby is scolding me for being behind. That’s not what I’m here for – in a normal year, yes, reading 400 books is a good target for me. As discussed in my opening thoughts, this isn’t a “normal” year (inasfar as any year ever is)!
/2025pages - My number-of-pages goal is based off my number-of-books goal, so this also needed adjustment.
/2025backlog - This one is for reading a good proportion of books I bought before 2025 this year, and is calibrated to be a quarter of the books I read this year. I decided to keep it the same, actually, because 100 books is not that many compared to the size of my backlog – but I did put a break in it.
/post-exam-backlog - This goal is done and dusted! And I’ve kept inbox zero so far since…
/showerbyten - This goal was kind of useful, but not enough to leave it around after the month’s trial, so I let it archive.
Closing thoughts:
As you see, this was a busy week! The next 7 days are crunch time for getting moved into the new place, so I’m hoping to avoid derailing on anything, but we’ll see. Wish us luck!
Thanks a lot for sharing your impressions on this. I have been observing something similar for myself, that I am ultimately more productive once I get back to scripted and to-do-listed days after such days, but the perfectionist upbringing in me always tends to scold me for just being lazy for allowing myself those days. It’s valuable to be able to compare that with your observations.
Moving stuff continues to be overwhelming – I have no idea how other people seem to manage to wrap it up so clearly! But as of the end of today, the old flat will no longer be our problem, and I seem to have managed to keep up with everything in the meantime.
There is actually nothing to report today. No changes to my goals, no new goals, no derailments. I think this might be a first?
Closing thoughts:
Sure is hot here! I don’t expect to do anything interesting until it cools down a bit next week…
Another quiet week on the Beeminder front – just chugging through all my goals, as you do! I do feel like my days are a little full, partly because the password-changing and Pocket-backlog-organising takes quite a bit of time, but those are both temporary goals, so that will settle out in time.
Derailments:
/yoghurts - I called non-legit, though, because through no fault of my own, there were no yoghurts. And it was 11:30pm, and I don’t drive, so… no yoghurt for me. We left the break in, and that has been useful as there is still no yoghurt.
Closing thoughts:
By next week, I will probably be moved into the new house! Maybe there will be an unpacking goal! We’ll see.
OK, not in the new house yet, but my bookcases are all built, and I’ll arrive on Monday. It’ll feel a bit bare and weird for the day, since we won’t get my books out of storage until Tuesday/Wednesday, but I expect I’m going to have a lot of fun unpacking!
I’m not entirely sure whether my books will fit on the shelves, to be honest. I think probably yes, but we’ll see.
Changes to existing goals:
/importbacklog - Backlog handled! I was going to create a maintaining goal with a threshold at 5, so I get the push to keep making sure I tag and archive the stuff I want to keep/delete the stuff I don’t, but turns out you can’t actually create a Readwise goal to do that, it always assumes you want to start where you currently are (0, in my case). That’s a dealbreaker, I don’t want to keep it at 0; I don’t even want to do so for a week until I can tweak it. So for now, no new goal.
(Technically I could ask the support team to set this up for me in exchange for the feedback, but I’m not sure it’s worth the hassle to me at this point in time when I could just wait for some time when I have 5 articles saved and make it then.)
Closing thoughts:
By next week, I should have tweaked the bright red line on a bunch of my goals to reflect the fact that they will be possible once more – stuff related to the house and to going cycling. For now they have long flat spots, so I’ll either ratchet or just edit the line. I’m excited, especially about getting back to cycling.
I am (finally) typing this from the new house! And while there’s still lots of unpacking to do, the basics are sorted.
Derailments:
/2025backlog & /2025reading - With all the moving stuff, reading goals fell a bit by the wayside. Now my stuff’s starting to get unpacked and things are a little more cosy, hopefully I can resume!
New goals:
/timetorecline - For August’s New Month’s Resolution goal, I’ve set up something to make sure I use the new recliner in my little reading nook. I wasn’t sure quite how to set it up, so I’ve started it off at 30 min/day. Anything counts, whether I’m gaming, catching up with friends or reading.
Changes to existing goals:
My various household goals have all been resumed, to make me do stuff like take out the recycling and fill/empty the dishwasher. However, they also have weekends off set now, to match my new understanding that I need days with minimal goals/productivity stuff.
/earning - Given the new rent (and council tax, oof), I’ve upped this goal to match the amount I need to earn now to pay bills, put money in my pension, etc.
Closing thoughts:
Despite derailments, this was a pretty successful week all round. Feeling pretty good about my progress!
This has been a pretty normal week! After all the upheaval of the last few months, it’s nice to get settled and know that I’m building a good routine that I should be able to adhere to for the foreseeable future.
It’s also been a productive week, thanks in part to Focumon, a silly Pokémon-esque productivity game I’ve been “playing” (it requires you to do focused work sessions in order to level up).
Changes to existing goals:
/gotwheels - This goal has also now been started up again, and I went for a ride this week. Not a long one, since I know I’m rusty. I’ll build it up over the next few weeks, and then maybe up the rate to 2/week again.
Closing thoughts:
I have a goal name in search of a goal: while shelving all my books at the new house, I thought of the name “tour de shelf”. I might need a goal to match it! Maybe something like my old “shelf shopping” concept, which I think I’ve had a goal for before (browsing my own shelves as if in a bookshop picking a new book, to keep myself aware of what all is there and potentially find the right book in the right moment)… or possibly something like reading a book from each shelf (though I’m not sure how to structure the goal in that case).
