November 10th, 2020

Alright, let’s get into the weeds this week (or perhaps flowers?). Overall, I think I’ve found a good equilibrium with Beeminder. I don’t often derail, but at the same time I have over a dozen beemergencies every single day.

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?)

Welcome to Purelog: for Writers

November 10th, 2020

About Brennan K. Brown