[Previous Beeminder Journal thread]
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, I’ll just say so.
NB: I am very frank about my physical and mental health, particularly the latter. I have GAD or PTSD, depending on which medical professional you listen to; that will be referenced in these posts as it affects my goals and daily life.
Useful things to know:
- I do a goal for every book I read. This is so I finish the books I start. The goals always have a rate of 5/day and an autoratchet to 1 day of safety, because that’s a perfect line between “small enough that I’ll always be able to do it” and “big enough to have the chance of hooking me back into reading this specific book”. I’d typically read at least a hundred pages a day, so these goals are very consciously tiny.
- I currently make a goal for every book I buy/receive to review. This combines an idea of @dreev’s about beeminding using everything you buy, and a method I was using to keep my new books in my easily-distractible mind. I was piling my books on a chair so they were inconvenient and I had to interact with them every day… and it was working wonders for helping me read them in a timely manner. But it doesn’t work with ebooks. Happily, I interact with all my Beeminder goals every day (even if just to collapse them and say “don’t need to do this every day”) so now these goals can stand in for that!
So here we are in 2021. And as promised, here’s a new Beeminder journal thread, since my previous thread got a biiiit overwhelming.
Derailments:
- /writethosereviews - They got on top of me, argh! I’m actually including incentives for writing/sharing reviews in time in my Game of Books for 2021, so that should be helpful.
- /hidrate - I don’t think this is actually legit, but the jury’s out right now until someone else can take a look, so I’ll include it now while I remember just in case. I’ve been down to the wire on this one for a few days, alas.
New goals:
- I’ve got a bunch of goals for the new year, but instead of big resolutions, I’ve gone with trying to create goals that are more like nudges, doing some small thing that pushes me toward what I want. So small that hopefully I can do it every single day, no matter what.
- /litsyupdate - This one is for participating on Litsy, but instead of being “review every book I read” or “read my feed and comment every day”, it’s just “post what I’m reading every day”. No requirements for length or any further participation… but probably the act of going to Litsy to post my quick status update will prompt checking my feed on many, maybe most, days.
- /pillowfort - Similar idea: for this I have to do any kind of participation on Pillowfort, e.g. post, reblog, comment…
- /justonestitch - I could’ve gone for some kind of “finish all those blankets lying around in various stages of completion”, but again, I went for a really small version of the habit that will hopefully pay off. I joined 6-7 motifs to a blanket from 2019 yesterday, because I’d started with my one stitch, so yay!
- /mit - This one is linked to TaskRatchet, and requires me to set an MIT every day. Beeminder holds me to adding the MITs to TaskRatchet… TaskRatchet holds me to completing them. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before!
- /gameofbooks2021 - My Game of Books points for this year are set up with similar ideas, including a point for posting on Litsy and a point for writing a review within 24 hours. The spreadsheet is open!
TaskRatchet Fails:
- None in the last week!
Changes to existing goals:
- /gameofbooks2020 - is over and archived!
Other comments:
- Nothing really to report this week, but of course, blwyddyn newydd dda i bawb!