I realize now, at this point, I have ±10 beemergencies a day. This is by design, as it pushes me to actually get my daily tasks done.

It doesn’t really work for bigger tasks I have, like blog posts, where sometimes I try to just create something the last day instead of utilizing the whole week for it. I’m not really sure how to intelligently segment something like writing an article in a way that fits into how I use Beeminder.

Systems Updates

• /distraction: Cleaned up the graph’s jagged ups-and-downs in the road editor. I also changed the rules on RescueTime to be more strict with what’s considered distracting so I waste less time on the computer.
• In general, I changed the views of a few older goals that I created back in 2017 to see their full range, rather than just when I restarted them. (Eg. /productivity and /french. I hope this increased context helps provide better understanding. Similarly, I’ve made data points public where applicable.
• I also still need to find a new solution to /morning-pages, and this is my verbal contract to myself I’ll have that corrected before next week’s post.

I finally took a gander at beemind.me for new ideas, and I’ll be going over the integrations megalist (now that I know it exists, hah) this week to see what else I can add.

My rule of thumb for new systems is this, I’ll add it to my already large list of beemindings if I find a way to:

1. Automatically track what I already to.
2. Automatically track something I really want to start doing.
3. Automatically track something that’s fun and takes less than five minutes (see /typing).
4. Or, manually tracking something I need to start doing.

New Systems

• /meta: I’ve been trying to figure out what my meta goal should be for awhile, and I think tracking the daily cumulative data points from my other systems fits. It’s definitely more interesting/fun than helpful right now, but why not?
• /typing: I love typing games, and have been using KeyHero forever, so why not give TypeRacer a try! Only problem is that it isn’t working. :( No matter what I do, I get a “Could not fetch scores.” for the value. I don’t know if it’s worth making a dedicated thread for?

Anyways, sticking with Beeminder, I’ve noticed that /meditation seems a little selective with which “mindful minutes” it adds as data points–if it’s a new medtiation from Headspace I haven’t done before then it’s added, but if it’s one that I’ve already done then it doesn’t seem to count it. I’ve noticed the iOS application updated though, so maybe it was just an anomaly.

Also, I think the reason things were weird with URLminder reading from Google Docs was simply because I didn’t set the privacy settings for the document correctly, whoops. Seems to be working now! I know it’s been forever since I initially started with this goal–and I haven’t really needed it since I’ve started a devlog on Draft that I plan to migrate–but I think it’s still worth finally implementing correctly.

I’ve been fumbling hard with /distraction lately. I’ve been derailing due to incorrect labeling of different websites I’ve been visiting, and it doesn’t update like other systems do, to the point where it’s 11:50 and it’s still orange because it hasn’t updated (and I know I shouldn’t be in front of a screen that late, but that’s another issue that needs to be tackled), which is a problem since it’s a do-less goal.

The simple solution to this is to just visit the RescueTime dashboard one per evening to make sure that the obscure sites I’m visiting are correctly labelled and that I’m not going over my unproductive screen-time limit.

For starters, I’ve written in the past about wanting to pivot, but I realize that I am perfectly capable of adding work rather than changing what this project is.

I’ve also written about wanting to give myself more self-permission. Essentially, I want a place that’s truly mine where I can place my thoughts exhaustively. Not just polished, finished work such as my blog or portfolio. I’m writing roughly 400 words a day anyways, it might as well be for a utilitarian purpose and public.

As much as I enjoy the concept of digital gardens as an ideal, I do have some problems with the specifics (also seen with Roam Research). It sort of reminds me of the Dvorak keyboard layout–far more practical and productive, but alas I’m am already far too entrenched in both QWERTY and traditional, hierarchical note-taking.

I also don’t want a specific program for private use, such as Notion. Rather, I found a wonderful Jekyll theme that incorporates a lot of the concepts that I am drawn towards: Backlinks, wiki-style links, context menu, page preview, margininlia, etc. You can see these being utilized here, it’s really cool.

To relate it back to Beeminder, in addition to collecting my notes, I want this to be a place for daily entries, that include getting more in-depth with my /gratitude journal, and /foodlog, for starters–and having the project be on GitHub means I can simply create a new system with GitMinder that only tracks that repository.

Anyways, much more related to Beeminder, I’ve been having trouble with URLminder. Currently, /morningpages2 is kind of just stuck at around 4,300 words for some reason–maybe I just input the Google Doc link incorrectly. I also had to sadly archive /typing, since I couldn’t get my TypeRacer games to sync, but that was a just-for-fun goal anyways.

P.S. Trying to get into APIs last week ended up snowballing into a new project of it’s own: SelfTeach.Academy. I don’t think there’d be enough interest to try to make this a reality, though.

Regarding /morning-pages, the solution I found was to use URLminder, this will track the word count of (multiple) Google Docs or Dropbox documents. I figure I’ll add a new document each month, as I find that’s a good time-frame to segment writing. And unlike Draft, URLminder lets you change the deadline time, which was my entire problem in the first place. The caveat being that I’ll need to adjust to writing somewhere else consistently.

This week’s verbal contract will be: To get a better at understanding API. Although I’ve found multiple new systems within the unofficial integration lists that I’m excited to use, it made me realize how much more potential there is–and perhaps the frustration that 3rd party solutions seem so ephemeral. Khan Academy, for instance, have deprecated their API entirely. FreeCodeCamp hasn’t had theirs updated in nearly two years. Is interest in this kind of things just too niche?

On the other hand, I think there’s benefit in there only being thirty or so high-quality official integrations. I know when I first was starting out, I didn’t feel overwhelmed by the paradox of choice.

New Systems

As I’ve written about a few weeks ago, limitation breeds creativity for me. It’s been fun trying to work with just the official integrations, but this would not be an experiment of self-improvement if stagnation was allowed! Exciting things are going on, I’m trying a bunch of new stuff.

• /ClozeMaster: Supplement my French learning with Duolingo
• /Meditation: It’s so cool how you can use Apple Health to track mindful minutes with different meditation apps. I’m still have to figure out my favorite but right now I’m using Headspace.
• /Prayer: Using Rosarium (Beeminder’s blog post about it), my relationship with spirituality is complicated, but I definitely enjoy the Rosary prayer, and it’s a good way to start my days with the right intentions.

P.S. I figured out why RescueTime was still measuring time even though I was AFK. It has to do with a pesky design flaw (more detail) of the ThinkPad W520 (which, by the way, is the best laptop ever minus this one thing).

P.S.S. Also added a link to @narthur’s beewiki to journal.bar, I hope it catches on! 😊

First off, my apologies for this post not being very Beeminder-specific, I’ve been getting dedicated with my development work with Jekyll the past week. So I haven’t really given the time needed to examine how my Beeminder goals have been affecting things in my life, like I usually (neurotically) do. I’m planning to do a full review of my now 24(!) systems.

Some bad news and good news: The bad news is that I definitely bit off more than I can chew with trying to modify Enjoyment work. It already had a 1,300 line CSS file, and I decided it would be a good idea to add Bootstrap on top of that, and although I love how it looks and what it’s capable of, it’s hopelessly bloated.

The good news is that I successfully completed Hacktoberfest for the first time! But even better, I went back to the drawing board and created my first open-source project for others: Watery, which is the most minimal yet functional Jekyll theme I could create. I went down the rabbit hole of classless CSS frameworks and used the most popular one, Water.css, for this.

I also just added a neat feature on the demo site that lets you effortlessly see how it would look using a different classless CSS framework instead, which really demonstrates its extensibility.

To tie it back to relevancy, I am probably going to use a variant of this theme for my Beeminder blog journal.bar. Speaking of, I’ve been thinking more down-the-line about this experiment, and trying to figure out if there would be any meaningful way to measure difference from the beginning to, say, a year after. I can offer my own layman’s observations, but it’d be neat to be an academic guinea pig.

I’m also really happy for the spread of systems I have, finding ways to track my mental health, physical health, hobbies, and both creative and technical projects.

Regarding French, I’ve been stuck in the Emerald league forever in /duolingo, but progressing down the tree nonetheless. /clozemaster is definitely a welcomed addition, as the lessons are a lot quicker and give a more nuanced look at how words are actually used.

Since I began tracking /writing in May, I’ve written over 100,000 words, which is crazy to me. Although a good portion is just private journal writing, I’m still happy I’m doing it everyday. Before, I’d really try to win NaNoWriMo every year (anybody participating, btw?) and always fall short because I never wrote >1,500 words a day otherwise. I suppose I’d rather write ~400 words a day indefinitely than risk pushing and burning myself out.

I’m still finding a bug (or maybe feature) where /meditation doesn’t add data if you’re repeating a guided meditation. I’ve switched over to doing simple timed meditation with Insight Timer and that seems to work instead!

I recently derailed on /fitness by just a couple hundred steps, which initially seemed silly. But in reality, I have to remind myself that whatever I’m tracking on Beeminder is the bare-minimum threshold, and I gotta pass it everyday no matter what.

One thing I’ve noticed that I talked about on the Beeminder Discord (which you should join!) is that all my systems ultimately fall within two categories: input-based vs. output-based.

Now, when I originally began with Beeminder many years ago, I had the rhetoric that you should aim for looking at input rather that output. Which I still believe is better–but why not both if that’s an option?

There are a few examples of this: /writing is the input, and other goals like /blogging or /poetry are output. (A caveat being that writing is fortunately easy to both quantify and automate.)

Output-based goals that I’ve been having the most trouble with are the ones that I haven’t really found a good input-based supplementary goal to add to it. I do really well with beemergencys pushing me towards doing work, but output goals don’t have a daily metric, they’re usually weekly or monthly.

I finally had the brilliant idea to use RescueTime and track the amount of time that I’m specifically on Lynda each day to supplement /courses. I had a few good ideas for tracking pages read or time with /books, but I often get weasel-y if the data isn’t automated. 😅 So it’d be nice to figure out a way to connect with Kindle or Audible.

(P.S. Working on a new Jekyll theme this week, Purelog!)

(P.S.S. Anybody doing NaNoWriMo this year? Using Beeminder to track it?)