shanaqui's Beeminder Journal

Life
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I like to have weekends off because it allows my mind to move from “there is stuff you need to worry about today!” to “Do what you want! It’s relax day!”.

There is something to be said about being on the hook constantly though. It prevents (or at least makes it significantly harder) falling into the procrastination pit on days without your normal workload. But it comes at the cost of just being constantly under pressure (German fun fact: We call this “Unter Strom stehen”, roughly: to be powered on. Alas it doesn’t really translate literally that well).

The mind is a wondrous place and seems to appreciate changes in the environment. Be it that you have certain places for doing work vs. for learning for Uni vs. for relaxing etc. Or in this instance: changes in pace.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents. Hope it helps :slight_smile:

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I am sorely missing this in my current life, but also I am sorely missing the ability to do otherwise, financially. :grin:

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Derailments: None!

New goals: /tabzeroes! I tend to fulfil my inboxzeroes goal reliably now, but sometimes I do that by opening a bunch of tabs with stuff to reply to or comment on or whatever, so the net result is not actually much closer to being on track with everything. For now this is set to 4/week, and we’ll see how that goes. Obviously my pinned tabs do not count in the tally.

Changes to existing goals: I’ve scheduled weekends off for my /learnwebdev goal, from next weekend onwards. I’m contemplating weekends off for a few more goals, too; I’d like more opportunities to build up (and retain) safety buffer!

TaskRatchet Fails: None!

Other comments: Between politics and the amount I work (or, more accurately, the way I fit working into my day), everything is A Bit Much at the moment, but I got my hair re-dyed this week so it is satisfyingly turquoise or electric blue, depending on what you call the colour my hair is (on the tub: turquoise), and I finished a book today, so things are not so bad.

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Derailments: /getmoving – I deleted some datapoints as I decided that I hadn’t really met the goal on those days and was being lax (not quite weaselly, but heading in that direction).

New goals: /freecodecamp tracks exercises I’ve completed on Free Code Camp, at a rate of 5/day. Tracking it by time using Rescuetime was actually incentivising some weaseliness of the ‘leave my page open a minute extra while I get a drink so RT will register more time, just to round off the session’ nature…

Changes to existing goals: With the advent of /freecodecamp, /learnwebdev is archived.

I’m taking /mits down to $10 again, because I’m a bit too stressed at the moment to have $30 on the line. /cadria is archiving, since I’ve barely touched the game for two months.

TaskRatchet Fails: N/a.

Other comments: I am now being way more successful with my /water goal because I set a reminder in Slack to fill my water bottle at the start of the day. The message icon on Slack drives me wild until I get up and do it, and once I have, as long as the water bottle is there and full, I drink almost without noticing, and am now gaining buffer on that goal! I’m now adopting the same principle with my inhaler…

I think I can’t have too many of these; they’re effective because they’re simple, easy actions to complete, and I know exactly what I need to do as soon as I see the Slack notif. So by that token, I’m capping the number I can have to one morning reminder per Slack and one evening reminder per Slack (I’m a member of four Slacks). We’ll see! For now it’s just my inhaler and my water bottle, and that’s working.

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Welp, this week has been a bit of a reorganisation spree for my goals. Here goes…

Derailments: /caloriedeficit, because I just ate more than I burned and didn’t care enough to try and redress the balance.

New goals: N/a.

Changes to existing goals: I’m archiving all book related goals that aren’t related to the Survivor contest, because really, truly, I have gotta stop making reading an obligation or chore. A post about this on my blog for more of my reasoning! So that’s /focusonbook and /backlogbook. I keep changing my mind on reading-related goals, so who knows; maybe I’ll be starting another one in a couple of months… /bookbed can stay, because it’s not about forcing me to read, it’s more about making time to share a companionable activity, and I can read fanfic or news articles or whatever I wish.

I’ve increased the rate on the tabzeroes goal from 4/week to 6/week, because 4 was not stopping the tab buildup. I’ve also moved /nailbiting up to five days of no biting per week, from 3, because I am succeeding too well! Aaand my /activeminutes goal has gone up to 20 minutes a day, because I keep getting too much leeway with my three-times-weekly 45 minute walks. /fitbitsteps has also been increased. /nothungry has also been made harder, with only 3 times per week where I eat when I’m not actually hungry now allowed. /sleep is increasing to require 7 hours of sleep a night.

On the other hand, I’ve changed my Litsy goal to a plain old +1 per day, as I don’t think I was being very accurate about what I was actually doing on what day. Either posts or comments on other posts count; just liking posts does not.

I had to get a break on /getmoving and /walkies, because I injured myself somehow (again) and couldn’t walk without pain.

I’m turning weekends off on /freecodecamp, which I think I did with my Codecademy goal and should’ve done for FCC too. Oh well, too late for this weekend!

TaskRatchet Fails: N/a.

Other comments: The Slack reminders continue to work for both my water goal and my inhaler goal. I could almost not beemind them at this rate, but no doubt that’s when I’d backslide…

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Another week again already?!

Derailments: /focusonbook and /housework both derailed because I just ran out of time on one overbooked day. And yes, by overbooked, I mean I got to reading and got distracted. /freecodecamp derailed because I did not have the braincells to get through a whole five exercises about for loops.

New goals: /littertray, because oh gosh these little monsters make a mess if it isn’t emptied right on time.

Changes to existing goals: I’ve lowered the rate on /freecodecamp to 1/day, because Javascript is driving me crackers. And… actually, I’m going to archive it, because no matter how I approach it, I am not enjoying trying to learn Javascript. At least not for now!

TaskRatchet Fails: N/a. In fact, I have been doing super well with using a fairly big charge as a deterrant from picking my left arm. The goal is to heal everything up on that arm by Sept 30, and my wife is the judge; one more day without picking that arm, and she says I’ll make it. Once that’s done, I’ll make a checkpoint with a lower penalty for that arm to still be scab-free, and a big check-in for healing up my other arm. The picking is to a large degree involuntary, but long sleeves and reminding myself of the penalty and redirecting to something else has actually been working well. No idea if it will keep working or be a sustainable solution, but it’s been an interesting experiment and well-worth making.

Other comments: One of my survivor goals has hit the target! /gameofbooks2019 continues racking up points, of course, but the actual target has been hit.

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Derailments: /fastfood and /water derailed legitly, because good habits are hard when you’re trucking to your parents’ house every day to get internet to work. /neatscience and /housework derailed as well, but I called not-legit because the one depends on internet (which we barely have at home right now) and the other requires me to actually be home.

New goals: N/a.

Changes to existing goals: I asked for some breaks because of the aforementioned issues with my internet. I can do most of my goals, but the selected five are just… not a priority while the internet is down and I’m trucking out to my parents’ to work every day. That includes /neatscience and /housework, and also /tabzeroes, /inboxzeroes and /engage.

TaskRatchet Fails: N/a.

Other comments: If you’re in the UK and looking to get broadband, let me anti-recommend Virgin Media. We’ve had intermittent connection (in the sense that it goes down almost as soon as we get it working again by unplugging the coax cable) for a week and a half now, one visit from an engineer, about 7 calls and 4 webchats, and we’ve racked up at least 3 blatant lies, 3 agents hanging up on us, and exactly zero meaningful apologies. GRR. Right, yes, calm now… and off to bed, so I can go to my parents’ house in the morning and answer support email!

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You triggered me :stuck_out_tongue: This reminds me of Vodafone (Germany) support:

Vodafone: We are going to send you a new cable.
Me: May I point out that you already did that last year (with 0 effect) and neither you nor I can come up with an explanation as to how the current problem might be related to that?
Vodafone: Oh. Indeed. It seems you are right, we did.
Me: This will take multiple days to get here and, again, neither you nor me have any indication that this will in fact fix the problem. Do we really have to do this?
Vodafone: The system demands that I send you a new cable.

A day later I discovered by myself that my router which’s settings I have not touched in months now took the “Use IPv6 if available” setting as a hint to stop knowing how to internet after some minutes. Again, this worked fine for > 1 year. I turned the setting off and had no trouble ever since.

If you think that was fun until now then hold tight because I dared to call Vodafone again to tell them about the solution. Oh boy are they NOT prepared to learn abou It involved multiple variations of “Uh… ok but what’s the problem? What are you calling about?” eventually leading to them saying that that won’t work what I did because nowadays they need to actually enable IPv4 individually per installation. And I told them but it does. And I am 100% positive I got an IPv4 connection. They again said I don’t. I then told them “OK how about I just tell you my IP address” and they were like “Oh that won’t work because see your network internally uses IPv4” and I KNEW they were gonna say that.
So I went ahead and told them my external IP. Which was of course IPv4. And asked them to confirm this IP is from them. And – surprise – it was. Then she realised I’m operating the cable modem in pass through mode. And then she said the best thing ever:

Vodafone: “Be glad you still have an IPv4 connection. IPv4 is superior to IPv6”
Me: “Uhm, no, it’s not. And the world is running out of IPv4 addresses. Which is probably why you deactivate them by default now. And I actually want an IPv6 connection.”
Vodafone: “Oh believe me it is very superior. See, I was recently send on a training event about this. We are regularly trained and informed about the latest developments.”
Me: “I see. I guess this is the moment where I tell you that not only did I do a 3 years apprenticeship as an IT specialist where we had to administer Cisco Switches and learned down to the bit how both IPv4 and IPv6 work, how their headers look like, how to wire ISDN devices, how DSL works and so on – I also studied Computer Science including multiple entire lectures on networking and distributed systems and wrote as part of that a basic operating system kernel and am now doing my Master in Computer Science as well. So please can we not have that debate?”

I don’t usually drop the “Oh but see, here is why I know better than you” bomb on people but she really pushed me¹. I also get that they probably have a lot of idiots on their lines but that should not be my problem.

¹ No, this isn’t mansplaining (not that anyone here would think that – this isn’t tumblr – but I’m ranting now anyways so whatever). She just happened to be a female but had it been a guy I was talking to I would have said the exact same things in the exact same tone.

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We just discovered that the “known issue” our ISP originally said they were going to fix “in two days” “over the network” was, you know, a snapped cable from the street to the house. This was when the second technician showed up to figure out why what the first technician couldn’t figure out.

(Technically it was just corroded at first. It snapped when he, unlike the first technician, pulled it out of the ground to check it. There was lots of digging and swearing in our downstairs’ neighbours’ garden today. And now, lo! I am reconnected.)

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Welcome back :slight_smile:

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Derailments: /craftathon. I just wasn’t feeling it.

New goals: N/a.

Changes to existing goals: I lowered the rate on /craftathon a bit because motivation in general is a bit low around here at the moment. I realised that /rescuetime needed the autoratchet turned back on and a steeper rate, so I’ve turned it up to 3 hours and put the autoratchet back.

TaskRatchet Fails: None yet, but I think I’m going to fail my checkpoint for still having my left arm fully healed up. :frowning:

Other comments: I am about to fail a survivor goal for the first time tonight. I lost a cross-stitch project I did a huge amount of work on, and I can’t quite look at any of my WIPs from sheer disappointment, so my /ufos (unfinished objects) goal is about to go off.

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Derailments: /ufos went off, as expected. Still feeling mad and disappointed about losing that bookmark!

/getmoving and /neatscience went off legitly, but my derail on /mits wasn’t legit – that was just editing the wrong datapoints because I apparently couldn’t read that day. Finally, /bookblanket went off. I called it legit because I could’ve been more on top of it, but on the other hand I don’t know if I could really have done it. I’ve hurt my wrists badly (trying to get the bunnies’ new hutch into our flat – a failure) and I don’t think I currently have the dexterity. Here’s hoping that gets better fast.

New goals: N/a

Changes to existing goals: N/a

TaskRatchet Fails: As expected, I failed the checkpoint on my left arm.

Other comments: Too tired to think, good night.

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Derailments: /mits derailed, alas! I just couldn’t do some stuff, so that dragged me down, and then I was in the red every day and there was no room for error. Possibly I could get out of this because there were tasks I ended up physically unable to do, but it feels fair for it to go off; I could’ve planned some of them better, probably.

New goals: /ynab! People have been extolling virtues of You Need a Budget to me for a long time, so I’ve signed up for the trial period. This goal runs just for that time, and has a rate of 5/week for making sure everything’s all reconciled. I suspect I will be sticking with YNAB; I’m not good at visualising at all, and even less good with numbers, so this is going to help a lot in keeping my money in the right proportions. It’s a little eye-opening; I have more money at my disposal than I thought, but at the same time I’m going to have to be smarter with my money if I want to do a fourth degree. And I do!

Changes to existing goals: /teeth got two days of flat spot added because I’d missed it for not-my-fault reasons, and #bookblanket because it took my wrists a couple of days to recover, during which I fell behind more and the goal started coming due again. /reviewpurchases may get retired if my /ynab goal works out – it’s always been a little unfocused anyway, because just being aware of what I’m spending isn’t planning ahead, though it has helped; I’m not archiving that, but it will probably go soon. I’ve added an autoratchet to /nofudge, because I’ve been really good about entering my calorie counts accurately and was gaining waaay too much safety buffer.

TaskRatchet Fails: N/a.

Other comments: Tomorrow is Wales’ game in the semi-finals of the Rugby World Cup, so I am clearing my schedule for potential joy or disappointment, ahaha. I’m rather hoping we win and get through to an England v Wales final, personally… Anyway, it’s a shame I didn’t think to put some breaks in my goals for this, honestly. I’ll remember for the Six Nations!

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:sob: at our World Cup semi-final defeat. Now I definitely don’t want to do my goals today… but I gotta.

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Derailments: /littertray, legit though nobody gets dogfood money as it was at $0. Really this is possibly not legit, since we were out all day and by the time I remembered it was too late to risk disturbing the neighbours, but it feels a bit like making excuses. /water, because I lost my routine for a couple days there. Gah.

New goals: /nanowrimo2019! It’s been a long time since I last did NaNo, but here I am again. This time with a much more solid plan than at any time since my first year, but also a lot to make up on the fly. Most of it gets worked out when I go for my walks… some of it pops out in the moment when I’m trying to figure out what happens next.

Also /protein, because I calculated the amount I should have per day for my weight and I am way, way under with my normal diet. A week of trying to boost my protein in sustainable ways has been working out quite well (if nothing else, I get less hungry and less inclined to snack) so I’m going to beemind it so I don’t backslide. I’m starting with something that is still quite significantly below the recommended amount, still, because I’ll never stick to it if I change things too fast. I’ve put an auto-ratchet on it, though, so I can’t gain too much leeway.

Changes to existing goals: I’m archiving /walkies because my wife just isn’t up for it at the moment and I’m always walking alone… which is covered by other goals. I’ve slightly tweaked the /littertray goal because it felt like a bit too much litter was being wasted, but I’ve only turned the rate down very fractionally.

TaskRatchet Fails: N/a.

Other comments: I am very tired and very frazzled right now, so I’m expecting to see a surge in datapoints for my beemergencies goal… I’m going to stay alert for stuff I need to turn down the rates on.

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Still my favourite journal :slight_smile: Out of curiosity: How do you determine your required protein intake? Is there conflicting information about how much you should consume or is there some golden standard that everybody agrees to (haha yeah no, of course not)? How did you determine which one you’ll follow?
I do second that protein makes you less inclined to snack. Matches my experience 100%.

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:flushed: Well thank you! I’m never sure what people are interested in, but I am glad there is stuff of interest!

The first thing I looked at was the NHS website, which discusses the daily reference intake, and that has 50g. That’s where the goal is currently set, actually, since it was also a satisfying round number.

Then I sort of noodled around and tried various different calculators and calculations – calculator.net summarises a couple of them, and these were my results from there, based on height, weight, age, sex and activity levels:

American Dietetic Association (ADA): at least 90 - 162 grams/day .
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): 60 - 210 grams/day (10-35% of daily caloric intake).
World Health Organization safe lower limit: 75 grams/day .

I think the one I saw first though was 0.35g of protein per pound of body weight. I was regularly eating just 20g of protein per day, and without getting too personal I can reveal that I do not weigh under 60lbs, so every single calculation or reference point is over double the amount I was habitually eating before.

Per Fitbit, I’m currently hitting about 70-80g a day of protein, so on balance I’m pretty content with that. It fits in the range most calculations suggest (apart from the ADA).

Caveat: if you are trying to lose weight, you should allegedly* calculate the amount for your target weight. That is still way more than what I was eating before, in case you were wondering, so even though I do want to control my weight a bit more, I still need to eat a lot more protein.

* One source only for this (so far at least).

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Derailments: N/a, if with difficulty because it’s been a hectic sort of week with my wife home sick and a surprising amount of work to do.

New goals: /checkins, for remembering to check in with folks on a mental health forum. Set at 1/day, but even just going to the website will count – I don’t want to force myself to engage if I’m too busy to be considerate or give equal time to other folks.

Changes to existing goals: /ufos is going away. It’s a survivor goal, but I already failed on it and it just isn’t really working for me, so it seems pointless to keep it around.

TaskRatchet Fails: N/a.

Other comments: Think I need to start some kind of goal for capping my daily hours, because in theory I have a cap to make me spread my work out through the week, and in practice I’m not doing it and end up with days where I’m two hours over my normal amount. (I only work a four-hour day, in theory: however, I work every single day, and have since I started working for a different website about 1.5 years ago! Even on Christmas Day, which I celebrate with much family ritual, I popped into the inbox. I’m dreadful for this!) I haven’t quite formulated how it should work yet… but we’ll see.

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Derailments: /sleeptown, because I’ve been going to bed waaaaay too late and missing the time to check in.

New goals: N/a.

Changes to existing goals: N/a.

TaskRatchet Fails: Failed my checkpoint on not picking my right arm. Otherwise, it does seem to be helping…

Other comments: It’s been, well, a busy week. Again. Plus much juggling of my budget, leading to the sad realisation that I can’t afford to start a new degree in January. So that’s postponed for a year. :frowning: But I have a savings goal, and will get there. In the meantime, gotta find lots of short/free courses to keep me busy!

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Derailments: /sleeptown, again, because my wife didn’t want to go to bed when I first asked, and then I started reading and lost track of everything… Also /nanowrimo2019, twice, because I just didn’t wanna.

New goals: /dishwasher. My wife has to fill it with dirty plates: I have to empty it when they’re clean. Also /malariax, because I’m doing an EdX course and it claims I need to put in a minimum of 3 hours a week for eight weeks to finish. I’m doubtful, both because of prior knowledge and because of my reading speed, but whatever, consistent work at that rate will either get me finished on time, or let me finish early. And I get to infodump excitedly at my wife about malaria*.

Changes to existing goals: Someone had to wiggle my road for /nanowrimo2019 around because it has no-mercy rerails, but this led to it wanting three days of progress in a single day. Also, somehow the final deadline was set to 29th November, not 30th.

I also need some breaks because I’m away next weekend, so I’ll go put 2-3 days break in on the following goals (too late to work for the weekend, but good for catching up): housework, tabzeroes, dishwasher, iron, writethosereviews, littertray, inboxzeroes, journal, bookbed, rescuetime, malariax. Hopefully I won’t need to ask Jon to fix any of those if they derail because I was late with my breaks!

TaskRatchet Fails: N/a.

Other comments: I’m running off to answer your support emails and then throw myself back into crocheting colourwork for this hat. Need to be wearing a hat with dragons on for the Wales game!

* Consensual infodumping. Apparently I’m cute when I enthusiastically explain what I’m learning. This has been so since I explained dróttkvætt to her like it was essential knowledge, during my first second year of university**, or possibly sooner.
** I have had three first years of university, two second years, and two third years. My first MA was completed in a single year. So if you’re thinking, “wait, wasn’t shanaqui a biologist, why did they specialise in Old Norse poetry?”*** – well, fear not, you are correct! I am however also a medievalist.
*** Please do not try sending support requests in Old Norse, I’ve forgotten most of what I knew**** – it’s been most of a decade, have mercy!
**** I’m just embracing the footnotes at this point.

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