Opening thoughts:
Today went well until I had some teeth issues again, and then everything went kaput. An emergency dental appointment saw that all sorted out, but it still messed up my week.
Derailments:
- /2026pages - I was keeping this one juuust above water, and then… welp. Oh well!
Closing thoughts:
I was lucky more goals didn’t derail this week, honestly! Looking forward to a fresh start with the coming week.
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Opening thoughts:
This week has been a bit meh, and though I’m feeling a bit more spritely today, I did have a discussion with my wife about how to fix my general overwhelm… and one thing I’m going to do is try to observe for a few weeks which goals have a major “ugh field”, and devise ways to deal with them if possible (e.g. remove the goal, change the rate, change the deadline, etc).
For now, only a couple of changes… but first, the derailments.
Derailments:
- /physio-wrist - This goal has a powerful ugh field because it’s uncomfortable, time-consuming and the improvements to my life are slow. I let it derail and get some post-derail respite to give me a bit of breathing space to figure out how to deal with it better.
- /noworkathome - I have a new work laptop, but haven’t spent the time to set it up yet, so I chose to work on my gaming desktop for the rest of this week to reduce the annoyance of the older, slower laptop.
New goals:
- /jaw-massage - This is August’s goal for the monthly resolution challenge, encouraging me to massage my jaw muscles three times a day (when waking, after dinner and before bed), in order to try to reduce the amount I’m clenching my jaw in my sleep. I’m not honestly sure if it’s doing anything, so far: I don’t have the signs of jaw tension that are described in articles about this, and my jaw muscles already feel relaxed during the day! Still, maybe it’ll help train them to stay relaxed at night. Given my nightguard from the dentist costs £150 (ridiculous! my wife’s costs £60) I’m keen to help it survive a long time and maybe not need to buy another.
Changes to existing goals:
- /physio-wrist - I’ve changed this up to a rate of 3/7 per day instead of 0.5/day, so I can complete it on days I’m not raiding (Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday or Sunday), to help reduce the ugh a bit – the days I’m not raiding have a bit more time.
- /bekind - The idea of this goal was to push me to be creative in finding ways to do kind things, which is something that fills my cup and helps me feel less overwhelmed and more energised. And it worked! But having a strict daily rate for that feels stifling and isn’t encouraging the right behaviour now that it’s given me the initial nudge – I don’t want to feel either “I’ve already done three kind things today, so I don’t need to do something in this situation” or “I haven’t done enough kind things today, so my chores aren’t complete”. It was a very good experiment and a helpful goal, just not one that’s a good idea long-term, it transpires! So it’s archiving now.
Closing thoughts:
I regularly go through cycles of having lots of goals and then needing to cut back, which reminds me somewhat of Hyperbole and a Half’s probably most famous image…
That said, I hope I’m slightly better than that in that I try to roll with the punches and figure out what I can cut down on, cut out entirely, or otherwise fix to make it a bit less overwhelming?
So here we go.
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Opening thoughts:
A better week, at least so far! A busy one, but still, a better mood, which is fortunate.
Derailments:
- /2026pages - I ended up edgeskating again, bah. I’m not actually sure if it was totally legit because it turned out there was a book I hadn’t recorded my progress on, but I don’t mind getting the respite anyway.
Changes to existing goals:
- Almost all of my goals other than the health-critical ones got a break for my time away. Unusually for me, I really do mean almost all! There are some I could keep up while I’m away… and I still might choose to. But I didn’t want to have to, and it seems like a good idea.
Closing thoughts:
I’ll probably post next week, even though my time off has started, but the following Friday I’ll be travelling, so probably not. I haven’t decided if I’ll skip or just do a late check-in. Either way, I expect there’ll be very little going on!
Opening thoughts:
Holidayyyy! And as a result, I’ve spent some time tweaking my goals a little, so I guess that’s what I have to talk about this week.
Part of it was just adding a “holiday” tag to the goals I intend to do while I’m away, and making extra extra sure the others are turned off or have pre-filled data, but there were some bigger changes, discussed below!
Changes to existing goals:
- /2026books - I normally love my single simple cut-off of twenty books at a time bought this year and not started, but I decided on reflection that I needed to give myself some more buffer and really just have fun with getting birthday books instead of worrying about it. The limit is set to go back down to 20, but the exact date for that might need tweaking.
- /2026reading - I’ve lowered my goal from 400 books to 300 books. I had to do this last year and ended up reading 400 books anyway, so the goal may still be revised… but it was adding a bit of pressure that I didn’t need at this stage.
- /2026pages - Since I won’t be reading as many books in total, it also seemed logical to reduce the number of pages I want to read overall.
- /2026backlog - This one’s for reading books from my backlog and I was seriously behind… so again, I’ve adjusted it to be more gentle. The intent behind all these goals is not to read a particular number of books, really, but to spend plenty of time reading and have a signal that warns me when I’m not, to signal to me that I’m not doing okay (since for me, not feeling great and having difficulty with reading are strongly correlated).
Closing thoughts:
And that’s it for now! Next week I’ll probably still check in, but a day or two later than usual.
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Opening thoughts:
I have little to report Beeminder-wise this week, and that’s good. It has definitely had me thinking about whether there are goals I can drop or combine or something to reduce the cognitive load, because I’m running quite high on goal numbers at the moment.
Closing thoughts:
I’ve had my birthday shopping spree and I’m not sure yet whether I’ve derailed or not. Time to dig through the bags and find out! Either way, I might honestly retire my goal for the year even though it’s in my No Excuses/No Derailments challenges. Last year it worked really well, but this year less so, and I didn’t find the sense of strain helpful so far this year. I’m not sure if that means I need a higher limit or maybe just a fresh start.
Either way, clearly I have much to think about!
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Opening thoughts:
Related to my thoughts last week, I have a new goal to help me identify goals that aren’t working for me and are just causing stress, though… for some of them, I’m not sure if I need to wait for the results, because it’s clear I’m marking them as ughy tasks every day.
I can report that I just avoided derailment on my books goal, at any rate!
Derailments:
- /2026backlog - Meh. Thought I could make it, because I had a book in mind to read, but then… the mood never struck and suddenly it was the last day, something came up, etc.
- /noworkathome - Stuff came up which made it feel urgent/worthwhile to keep an eye on Slack when I was on my gaming PC. I did all my non-communications stuff on my new work laptop, but still felt I’d violated the strict sense of this goal.
New goals:
- /ughfield - This is the new goal mentioned above: each day, I add a +1 for the three-or-more ughiest goals in my spreadsheet, and then I get +1 for this goal. It’ll only last for this month, and hopefully give me plenty of data.
Changes to existing goals:
- /jaw-massage - This retired at the end of the month, because it wasn’t working – jaw tension does not seem to be the cause of my teeth-clenching, at least not in any way I can target by massaging it during the day!
Closing thoughts:
My ‘ughfield’ goal is already giving me some clear ideas about how to make life a bit less ughy, which will be nice, but I really am going to give it time to get the data in before I make decisions. For now, I’ll try to maintain the status quo.
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Opening thoughts:
My “ughfield” goal has definitely given me some data and I’ve just gone ahead and gone with archiving the most unambiguous cases it’s turned up so far – after a week it was clear that some goals just need to go. So let’s dig into that…
Derailments:
- /fastfood - I can’t remember what exactly the circumstances were, but probably to do with me being in a lot of pain and not wanting the food we had here because it was hard to chew – I was having trouble with my wisdom teeth this week (now settling, whew).
Changes to existing goals:
- /lunchbreak, /timetorecline, /steamdeck, /2025books - These are the goals I’ve so far decided to archive, because they were causing me “ugh” every day or nearly every day. Funnily enough they’re all meant to be fun/relaxing goals for well-being and spending time doing fun things, but… at the moment, seems like making time for that is more burden than it is use at the moment.
Closing thoughts:
There are a couple of other goals that I’m finding reliably annoying, but I want to see if that holds once I’ve got rid of the worst offenders or whether everything starts to feel a bit more chill… we’ll see how it goes.
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Opening thoughts:
The aim of the game at the moment seems to be reducing the number of plates I have spinning to the most necessary and useful ones, including just reducing the amount of data entry I’m doing, so there are a couple more archives this week! Some of them are the results of tallying the “ugh field”, some of them are just realisations about what makes most sense for me at the moment.
This is a day early, because it’s already getting super long in draft form, so I want to split it off now so any more goes into next week’s post.
Derailments:
- /dailyweight - I am retaining water a lot at the moment and I think that’s most of this jump-up, but whatever, I’m happy to get some extra headroom by derailing.
Changes to existing goals:
- /finishline - This is a good goal in many ways; it was definitely a good idea. However, right now it’s not as relevant because I don’t have a lot of books on the go at once, so it’s retiring for now.
- /micronutrients & /esomeprazole - I’ve decided these can archive and I’ll maintain /medsbeforemidnight for both purposes, giving me a little more flexibility and a bit less double jeopardy.
- /timeforme - I don’t think this goal has a meaningful impact on anything at the moment, other than it being sort of nice to see the numbers. I could ratchet it so that it has real bite, but I’m not sure that would do me any good either, given at the moment I most seem to need a lot of flexibility and a minimum of “mandatory fun”. Given the aim of simplifying things a bit, I’ve set this one to archive as well.
- /iqoro - I’m archiving this one because it’s comfortably a habit now, and it just adds extra life admin to worry about the data. I’m also well beyond the initial six months of “training” with it recommended for seeing benefits, so I might also be deciding to stop using it (though I need to look at my data on symptom tracking first to decide on that).
- /waterpik - In practice, I use this at the exact same time as I brush my teeth, 100% of the time, so I don’t need a goal for this – at least not now that I’m well in the habit of remembering it (it helps that I keep the waterpik right next to my toothbrush). So this is also archiving.
- /teeth - Speaking of, this goal is demonstrating very clearly that it’s a solved problem for me, so while I’m reducing my life admin… this one can archive too. It’s a proud moment, honestly. If you never read my blog post about my difficulties, check it out.
- /magazines - I’ve lowered the rate to just 1/week, because in practical terms I am only reading New Scientist properly; the others I might maybe skim, but overall they’re a bit too highbrow and waffly for me to be interested in.
- /gratitude - This has been a very long-running goal, and I still intend to drop into the gratitude thread if it stays active, but it’s become more admin than it’s worth to me as a Beeminder goal.
- /snackattack - I think this is another case of a goal I’m doing really well with and can archive safely. It’s mostly automatic at this point!
- /postcrossingtasks - Aaand another one, same story – I’ve found how to fit my Postcrossing tasks into my day, and it happens automatically.
- /postcrossing - This one isn’t working for me at the moment; I’m taking a bit of a break from receiving postcards while I get a forwarding service set up for safety, and it hasn’t been working to get me sending postcards/going for walks. I might revive it later.
- /ffxiv-login - This is a “mandatory fun” goal which has actually been going quite well – but I think it’s mostly become a habit again, and the problem it set out to solve isn’t the same anymore. Since we’re in the business of slimming down what I’m worrying about on any given day, I think this one makes sense to archive too – and hopefully as things ease up a bit, some of my other FFXIV-related goals will stand in for it anyway, as I don’t plan to archive those until I’ve got the related achievements.
Closing thoughts:
In other news, the other day I put my right hand down to support my weight (cautiously), and discovered that it can indeed bear weight again without much more than a tiny twinge. Clearly sticking to my physio and slowly working my way up through the different strengths of resistance band has ultimately made a difference, and helped my torn ligaments heal, just as we hoped.
I didn’t think it’d take so long, and in retrospect I should’ve gone back to the GP for imaging because probably a little bit of surgical repair would’ve been good… but we’re here now, and partly thanks to Beeminder keeping me at it. (Also thanks to me for actually doing the thing, even when it was hard.)
I’m not ending my physio goal yet; I’m doing fewer sets at the moment (though with a higher resistance band than I was before) and just feeling out if I can stop and move to just general strength training instead of this very specific targeted exercise.
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Opening thoughts:
Welp, the goal changes tapered off this week, but there’s still a couple more! I think I’ll let the dust settle before I worry about any others!
Derailments:
- /checkmail - I just hit the uncle button on this one, because it’s one of my ughiest goals and I really really don’t want to do it today. I’m hoping the respite will give me a chance to do a cleanout of our mail shelves and make things a bit less ughy, but gradually instead of having to do it all today.
- /fastfood - I was having a very stressy day and we were concerned that I wouldn’t eat dinner (because I get pickier about textures and such when stressed) and it’d be wasted if Lisa made the food we had. There wasn’t much time to pivot, so, fast food.
Changes to existing goals:
- /slackoff - This is another thing that has become enough of a habit that having it around is just one more thing to remember to +1 every single day. I’m gonna trust myself that the goal isn’t the only thing holding this in place, heh.
- /yoghurt - We get some amazing yoghurts delivered from a local service, and that’s leading to me eating yoghurt in good time consistently on my own – especially since my wife has developed the matching habit of putting out a yoghurt for me at dinner time. So I figured, while I’m reducing the goal admin, this one can go too.
- /steps - Right now, this is a graph I’m not even looking at, and it has no bite. I’m going to archive it for now and clear it out for a while, and then hopefully restart it (or start something similar) with a bit more oomph to it.
Closing thoughts:
The week ahead is still busy, but a couple of factors mitigate that, and hopefully things will get less stressy soon!
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