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Sunday, October 06, 2013

Beeminder ramp up time

Chocolate by Alba Soler Photography from flickr (CC-NC-ND)

Ten days ago I started serious Beeminder experiment. I came up with 10 things I want to track, and 6 of them seemed sensible enough to put on Beeminder (the other 4 I'm just tracking offline for the time being, there are various complications with them, I might add them to beeminder later).

My initial goals were very conservative, and it doesn't surprise me that I had little trouble meeting them. As of writing this I'm 15 days away from failing on the slowest moving goal, and 31 days on average (some of my offline goals are doing a lot worse).

Here's a per-goal update, sorted by time to fail from hardest to easiest.
  • Online Education. That was all long overdue. It goes very smoothly, feels very useful, and I see no problem with ramping this up from 2/week to 2.5/week. I put some effort into finding out some non-Udacity courses, but it's relatively problematic what will count as a "unit" there. It's relatively hard to rush it if I ever fell behind, since most online education requires some serious homework, not just watching instruction videos. Really happy with this. I might increase it more once I'm happy with non-Udacity courses as well.
  • Exercise. That went really well. I'll only increase it from 2h/week to 2.5h/week since I'm  also gradually increasing intensity, and I don't want to overdo this too suddenly, since that would risks injury.
  • Books. It's really difficult to say how it's going to work, since I only finished one book during last ten days (on Kindle). I tried some long overdue paper books I wanted to read, and that mostly just reminded me how awful and inconvenient paperbooks are. I sorted out audiobook player on my phone, since DicePlayer kept crashing all the time and wrote a script for speeding up audiobooks just to be sure. I'll probably should just throw away all the paperbooks in my backlog, and find ebook (or audiobook) versions instead if possible. Did I mention how much paperbooks suck? Anyway, increasing the rate from 1/4 weeks to 1/3 weeks feels safe enough.
  • Open Source contributions (as counted by github commits). I set this goal very conservatively to be below my average github contributions over the last year, but it was actually very close to derailing since these tend to happen in a very spikey manner. I had 1 commit over 9 days, and 8 commits today. Since this is important, I'm going to increase the rate from 2/week to 3/week.
  • Play Magic - for a moment I was worried that UW Control and Esper Control might screw Standard completely, in which case I might find it too unfun to play for the next three months, but everything looks good now after all. This is ton of fun, so I'll just double the goal from 5 games/week to 10 games/week. It's pretty silly to have "have fun" as a goal, but why not.
  • Blog - the unfortunate thing about this goal is that it tracks quantity, not quality, but there's nothing wrong with writing more shorter posts, when the alternative is not writing at all. I'll just double the goal from 1/2 post a weeks to 1 post a week, since that doesn't seem too difficult.

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