shanaqui's Beeminder Journal

[shanaqui]

I keep thinking I should have some kind of weekly review going on, and this seems like the best possible forum for it, so hey! Here goes. I’m going to try and update every week with a roundup of new goals, archived/deleted goals, and anything I’m struggling on or changing up.

So changes this week:

/bsupport has been retroratcheted for the first time ever, true to @dreev’s wish that more of us would skate the edge on our meta goals. Mostly what I’m learning is that due to being ultimately based on my Tagtime pings, my daily amount can be a bit variable… but it’s often more than the two hours my goal is set to (and almost never less). For now, I’m going to set an autoratchet up, so I never have more than four days of buffer. That feels close enough to the edge that I’m a little uncomfortable… which is probably the sweet spot for a goal that can be variable, while leaving it some ability to push me.

/nailbiting was born! Mostly because I bit a nail down to the quick so badly I had to pad it to be able to type for 2-3 days. My nails goal (do-less) wasn’t working, so now it’s days without nailbiting. Right now I don’t have to try and hit it every day, but 3 times a week feels like a stretch that might do me some good.

/weeklyreview was born, and that’s for this thread!

/water was born, starting very very small with a single glass of water per day. I do not drink enough, ever. If this goal doesn’t work, I’m going to consider a smart water bottle of some sort, but it seemed like a low tech solution might be worth trying first.

/dunwanna was ruthlessly culled. This was designed to make me do things I don’t want to and might otherwise procrastinate, but I don’t think it was really creating any push. It was entirely pointless and toothless, so, g’bye!

/reviewbacklog is retiring with honour. It’s been great for making me write reviews eventually, but it was hard to keep updated and thus derailed frequently but non-legitly. A new goal will replace it as of – actually, now, hang on.

/writethosereviews was born! This is modelled on the same principle as my bookblanket goal, with pretty much the same recipe. Now I get two days after reading a book to a) review it and b) crochet a motif to go in the book blanket.

I don’t feel like there’s anything I’m especially struggling with at the moment, so yay!

[zedmango]

I have a couple questions, if you don’t mind:

@shanaqui

/bsupport has been retroratcheted for the first time ever, true to @dreev’s wish that more of us would skate the edge on our meta goals. Mostly what I’m learning is that due to Tagtime, my daily amount can be a bit variable… but it’s often more than the two hours my goal is set to (and almost never less). For now, I’m going to set an autoratchet up, so I never have more than four days of buffer. That feels close enough to the edge that I’m a little uncomfortable… which is probably the sweet spot for a goal that can be variable, while leaving it some ability to push me.

Hang on! Hold the presses! Bsupport is a tagtime goal?

That doesn’t make sense, for a few reasons:

• if you’re retroracheting, tagtime may give you problems because of its probabilistic nature, in that you may not have the margin of error needed

• don’t you get paid according to bsupport? Since it’s possible to look ahead to determine when the pings are coming, seems like the income-maximizing strategy would just be to work if and only if there will be a ping in the next 5 minutes.

• being paid probabilistically may violate labor laws…

@shanaqui

/water was born, starting very very small with a single glass of water per day. I do not drink enough, ever. If this goal doesn’t work, I’m going to consider a smart water bottle of some sort, but it seemed like a low tech solution might be worth trying first.

I’m curious why you think you don’t drink water enough. I have seen others post similar comments:

Is daily weight under your direct control?

I see many issues with the OP I have come not to trust my body’s signals on thirst and hunger. Water is a great resource for the body and mind, and drinking only when you think you feel thirsty means you’re not hydrating enough. This will not always work when you have stuff to get done. While i have been practitioning IF and have increased my endurance in how long i can wait before eating, after a certain point in time , i need to eat something in order to continue being productive. Of cours…

It just seems to me that your body is already telling you when you should drink water. Where does this idea “drinking when you’re thirsty means not drinking enough water” come from?

Also related:

Good Atlantic article on intuitive eating and akrasia

Why you should not beemind weight. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/intuitive-eating/583357/

[dreev]

@shanaqui

@dreev’s wish that more of us would skate the edge on our meta goals

Wait! I didn’t mean it like that, really! On reflection I like the compromise idea after “but that’s pretty unreasonable to expect of employees” here:

Anyone running their company (contracts/promises) with the use of beeminder?

Yes, but usually with ultra-conservative yellow brick roads. I’d actually love it if more of us edge-skated more because that makes it nice and predictable how much people will be working. High pledges make it even better because then you know that any deviation from the YBR would only be for a genuine emergency, not just self-niceness. But that’s pretty unreasonable to expect of employees! Actually, what about this compromise, that’s somehow just now occurring to me: The convention for your …

In any case, this kind of thing is now @mary’s domain, as soon-to-be COO/CFO so listen to her not me!

Also, these journals in the Life category are pretty amazing. Thanks everyone!

[fryhole]

@zedmango

It just seems to me that your body is already telling you when you should drink water. Where does this idea “drinking when you’re thirsty means not drinking enough water”

There are plenty of medical articles saying that by the time you’re thirsty you’re already dehydrated, though any specific glasses-per-day target is just a guess. Your hydration needs will vary depending on your activity level, the weather outside, your diet, and so forth.

[shanaqui]

Well, it’s less of a “Danny says so” and more a “actually, that would be more useful for me” reaction! Though it still grants your wish whatever my intent.

[shanaqui]

Re: the water drinking:

Being thirsty but not drinking has been a lifelong issue for me. It may have contributed to the fact that I had to have my gallbladder out at the age of 21, despite fitting none of the more standard risk factors. (My doctors had no real idea what the heck did cause me to have quite so many stones so young, and this was one of the vague theories.)

Also, people might wish they hadn’t asked at this point, but biology is biology and on reflection and as a biologist I’ve got little shame about that… (look away now if you’re squeamish!)

…I get a lot of urinary tract infections, and standard advice from doctors is to drink more water in that case in order to flush the bladder more frequently. It does help when I actually do it, but finding the motivation has always been an issue (I’d rather read than interrupt my reading to go get a drink!).

Also, my dentist wants me to stop drinking so many carbonated drinks, which is also a fair point.

I’m not planning on immediately deciding on a big arbitrary goal; I plan to increase to a point where it’s helping meet my goals (less discomfort, fewer carbonated drinks) and feels sustainable (I’m never drinking just for the sake of it, I don’t resent it). Hence starting super small!

[zedmango]

@shanaqui

Also, people might wish they hadn’t asked at this point, but biology is biology and on reflection and as a biologist I’ve got little shame about that… (look away now if you’re squeamish!)

…I get a lot of urinary tract infections, and standard advice from doctors is to drink more water in that case in order to flush the bladder more frequently. It does help when I actually do it, but finding the motivation has always been an issue (I’d rather read than interrupt my reading to go get a drink!).

Also, my dentist wants me to stop drinking so many carbonated drinks, which is also a fair point.

Thanks for being willing to share and sorry if I got too personal or off-topic. What are your favorite things to drink - those might give you extra incentive. I always like having yummy sweet drinks handy and I never get tired of drinking mango or pomegranate juice!

[mary]

Temporary derailment of @shanaqui’s thread. (I’m sorry!)

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@zedmango

being paid probabilistically may violate labor laws…

People on Team Bee are NOT paid probabilistically; we’re paid for the hours we work. Beeminder employees are either salaried or paid by the hour; Beeminder contractors are paid either by the hour or the service (depending on the contract).

Whatever group the person falls into, they’re/we’re allowed to track time any way we choose and we just report how many hours we work. Using TagTime to track our time is something we’re allowed to do to make tracking easier for us, not something we’re required to do. Some people prefer Toggl, and they use Toggl.

@zedmango

• don’t you get paid according to bsupport? Since it’s possible to look ahead to determine when the pings are coming, seems like the income-maximizing strategy would just be to work if and only if there will be a ping in the next 5 minutes.

I would bet a lot of good money that no one on Team Bee would ever do anything remotely like that. This would be more or less equivalent to just lying about one’s hours on a timesheet… which would also be an “income-maximizing strategy”.

@dreev

In any case, this kind of thing is now @mary’s domain, as soon-to-be COO/CFO so listen to her not me!

Everyone who works at or with Beeminder could have a $0 flat road (mine’s a $0 pledge that currently has a 24-day buffer…) or no road at all. I wouldn’t be inclined to use Beeminder to enforce work hours. It’s easier for us to have the data in Beeminder cause it’s quick and easy to get to, but it’s not needed in order to make anyone do anything, nor should anyone feel that it is unless THEY want to enforce their OWN adherence to their work schedule, since it’s all pretty flexible and so can fall prey to akrasia.

If someone who works for or with Beeminder weren’t working the hours they committed to, we’d handle taking about those work expectations the same way any other company would: conversations, warnings… I dunno… we’ve never had to worry about it. Any dialling of the roads that people do or pledging is up to us for the sake of our own regulation, so we don’t wake up at the end of the week having not worked at all.

@dreev and @bee and I have talked about and strategized about what we should do with our roads, and have definitely asked each other to try things, but I take those conversations to be basically like we talk about all of our roads we use to keep ourselves accountable. If either of us made a flat road tomorrow, that would be fine. (I mean, the roads we have are things of beauty, so there’d be an aesthetic loss, which would be a shame, but other than that, it would be fine.)

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Thread derailment over.

[mary]

I have trouble drinking enough water too. (In fact reading this thread made me get up and go get some cause I’ve been so very bad about it this week.)

I also have a nail-biting type of goal that I’ve been way not ambitious enough with. I’m used to tracking it as a do-less, but you’ve inspired me to make a meta-goal for it that will track days without the habit (powered by either IFTTT or Zapier or something).

I’m not particularly crafty (anymore) but I want a book blanket so bad. But your goal there makes me remember that I’m not enforcing enough fun stuff… I need to force myself to do more fun, deliberate, thoughtfully leisurely things.

I’m with @dreev… I really do love these journals. They impact things I decide to do and they’re inspiring. Thanks!

[zedmango]

@fryhole

There are plenty of medical articles saying that by the time you’re thirsty you’re already dehydrated , though any specific glasses-per-day target is just a guess. Your hydration needs will vary depending on your activity level, the weather outside, your diet, and so forth.

Thanks for this by the way! Good to know!

@shanaqui how’s Biscuit recovering? Hope she’s ok.

Weekly Roundup

[shanaqui]

@zedmango

@shanaqui how’s Biscuit recovering? Hope she’s ok.

Answering the most important thing first: she’s doing great! No more meds or hand-feeding necessarily, thank goodness!

[shanaqui]

@mary

Using TagTime to track our time is something we’re allowed to do to make tracking easier for us, not something we’re required to do.

And gosh it is so much easier for me than starting up a timer for every quick ten minute scout of the inbox. At one point before I used Tagtime I was clicking into my Toggl tab every few minutes to turn off one timer, start another, etc etc.

@mary

I’m not particularly crafty (anymore) but I want a book blanket so bad.

I love making blankets. There’s something so satisfying about it. I have never, um, actually finished one yet. (One of them was too complicated for me at the time, and another was just too heavy and unwieldy until we had some more space… which we do now, so it’s out for me to work on any day now. :D) It’s so satisfying to work on something so big/useful/snuggly.

[phi]

re water: I am (or rather was) super guilty of this, too, and I suspect it to be one of the reasons of my headaches. Here’s what worked for me:

I got flic buttons, set one up to log my water consumption into Beeminder (and Apple Health) and it’s just so satisfying to press them! And it did change my water consumption a lot and you can see it in the graph:

I set up autoretroratcheting with 0 buffer and from the graph you can clearly tell that at the beginning I drank all the water and easily made it to green, later only blue, eventually my enthusiasm dwindled to orange and you can see from the bumps in the line above the YBR that the retroratcheting occured less frequently.
This confirms a long standing suspicion of mine: When I realise “I need to drink more” it goes fine for… not even one whole week! And then I fall back into the old me. Not anymore! Here’s the whole graph:

My goal in that time was set to 1.5l per day. That’s 6x8oz or 6 glasses of water. Or 6x250ml more or less.
I found this very easy to incorporate into my day and the zeno reminders are a good interval for getting you to drink. I just empty a glass all at once most of the time, then put the empty glass on the table and press the button! So satisfying!

There’s one caveat though: If you got a nice white flic button next to your glass of water do NOT confuse it with a pill or some effervescent tablet!

In the entire time I beeminded water consumption I have had very very few headaches. It’s too early to conclude that they are correlated (esp. since this isn’t the only thing in my life I changed) but I’m not complaining! Maybe having a cute physical button on your desk works for you too, @shanaqui @mary.

Here’s the goal:
https://www.beeminder.com/phi/water

[shanaqui]

I would really like a physical IFTTT button or two, actually! I’m not quite at the point where I want to invest that much money, though. I did have IFTTT widgets on my phone, but they kept not firing (and IFTTT support ignored my email) so…

[phi]

the flic app supports widgets too! (talking about iOS here) They can’t do everything the buttons can do but they can talk to Beeminder (via https) and they can call Shortcuts (via url scheme) if I’m not mistaken.
And yeah the buttons are like $100 for 4. But I spent a good part of a day looking for alternatives and what I found was not exactly overwhelming. And flic comes from Sweden! Now if their support wasn’t so super slow poke…
So maybe try the flic app and see if its widgets do the job for you?

[shanaqui]

Hmm, worth considering! For now I’m putting it in via Fitbit, which is reasonably speedy, but…

[apolyton]

@mary

I have trouble drinking enough water too. (In fact reading this thread made me get up and go get some cause I’ve been so very bad about it this week.)

I also have a nail-biting type of goal that I’ve been way not ambitious enough with. I’m used to tracking it as a do-less, but you’ve inspired me to make a meta-goal for it that will track days without the habit (powered by either IFTTT or Zapier or something).

I have a do-more goal for water, getting data from Fitbit. Fitbit gets its data from MyFitnessPal where I do all my food tracking.

On the practical side of it, filling a 1lt bottle and having it on my desk has greatly increased my consumption (easier access) and made tracking easier (easier to enter 1000ml once rather than 250ml four times)

[clarissalittler]

I’m using a manual do-more goal for water but I’ve also found that it’s a lot easier to keep track of by having a standard thing I drink out of. In my case, it’s a big ol’ quart mason jar that I fill to the 24 oz line. I also know my coffee cup is 12 oz. Pretty much every datapoint I enter ends up being a multiple of 12 which makes it easier.

[shanaqui]

Welp, it’s been a week!

Derailments: None!

New goals: None!

Changes to existing goals: I’m going to ask support to delete my four goals for spending time with my bunnies. At the moment, I’ve been tracking the amount of time, but each bun has different needs, and also moods that vary depending on the day and their own mysterious calculations. Also, setting timers was not going well. So I think I’m going to replace each goal with a daily one that just requires me to spend some time (any time) with each bun each day.

Other comments: I’m getting a bit weaselly and lax about my “entering meals” goal by just estimating instead of actually taking the time to figure it out, and studies say you tend to underestimate and misremember what you’ve eaten, so I’m gonna have to have a think about that.

(If anyone feels like being nosey, feel free to trawl through my gallery and pick out a goal and make me talk about it, btw. Sometimes the ones we’re not thinking about are the most important to get right…)

[phi]

I thought I once saw a dunwanna goal or something like that? And I was just looking for it and can’t find it. Am I imagining things? But really, that goal name, that just has to be from you
If this goal was or is about what I think it was then I have a similar goal (albeit with a way uncuter name: moa - moments of avoidance) And it struck me that you might be able to share some insight.
Like sometimes when the Netflix is strong and it’s late at night the couch right behind me has this irresistible urge to just flop onto and pass out there (just a quick nap). Vs. going to the long long way to the bedroom. And if I’m weak (and realise it in that moment), that’s a +1 on my moa goal. Does or did your dunwanna goal work like that?