Motivatability

[Mirabai Knight]

My current goals, for context: https://www.beeminder.com/nepomuk

I've been trying to put a number on where I fall on the ideal Beeminding personality scale and have been struggling with it. I've gotten great results from Beeminder over the last few years and have trouble imagining what my life would look like without it, but it seems like I don't seem to use it quite as intended. For one thing, I quickly realized that I needed to have nine goals -- no more, no less. Something about that 3x3 grid just makes me feel like everything is under control. When I achieve a goal and there's a gap in the grid, I have to find another one to add in. When I want to add a new habit, I have to wait until one of my other goals reaches completion so I can archive it and make a space. Sometimes I've been tempted to have more than nine goals going at a time, but every time I've tried, it's quickly gotten too overwhelming and everything has felt like it's thrown out of balance.

Also, I usually have only one (or at the most two) high stakes or high derail-risk goals going at a time. The rest are usually set at either a flat road or a very gentle road with plenty of buffer built up, and I'm very hesitant to retroratchet. I think of Beeminder as 90% tracking, 10% motivating. Now, the tracking itself is often very motivating on its own, and frequently when I archive a goal that I was only using for tracking I often find the good habit I established with that goal fading very quickly, sometimes causing me to reinstate it. But I'll only assign challenging weekly numbers to goals that are very high priority, like the marketing assignment for the business I'm helping to set up or the 260 word per minute stenography certification test that I had to pay $170 to attempt each time and was only able to attempt twice a year. (Finally got that one, with the help of Beeminder! Woohoo!)

So I feel like Beeminder is crucial to keeping my life in order, but from the outside it might look like I'm being ridiculously easy on myself, setting goals that are practically impossible to derail from. I dunno. It works for me. Even though I've got an 82-day buffer on my "achieve an empty reply-to inbox once a week" goal, being able to check that box is a huge boost to my day, and I've been able to do it several times a week for the past several months, which has meant a big reduction in stress compared to my previous habit of keeping a reply-to inbox that would languish at 20 or 30 emails for months at a time. 

Does this make me a bad Beeminder user? Arguably. Would my life fall to shambles if I had to stop using Beeminder? Almost certainly. So I don't know what number that makes me, but I'm incredibly grateful to have it.

[Mirabai Knight]

Addendum: A quick check of Mint.com tells me I've paid Beeminder a total of $130 over the past two years. (Though an email archive search tells me that I derailed at least once in 2012 and the first Mint.com entry is for 2013. Did early Beeminder charges post under a different name, or did Mint.com forget a transaction? I just did a keyword search for Beeminder.)

That's two $30 charges, three $10 charges, and eight $5 charges. No $90s yet, though it's been a close call many, many times! :'D

I don't know how that compares with the average amount of money paid per customer, but I thought it would be interesting to mention. From what I can tell, I've been a customer since 04/2012.

[Michael J.J. Tiffany]

Sometimes simple questions become harder to answer when you know the subject better, because you see difficulties others miss. Maybe, over two years, your very motivatability has changed. 

Two years and $130 later, how are you different? Has it just been about the goals, or did you make yourself different, too?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Akratics Anonymous" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Typed on a device that often makes hilarious autocorrect decisions

[Daniel Reeves]

> Did early Beeminder charges post under a different name, or did Mint.com
> forget a transaction? I just did a keyword search for Beeminder.)

We probably canceled the charge for some reason. We're pretty generous
about that. Cf blog.beeminder.com/legit

> That's two $30 charges, three $10 charges, and eight $5 charges. No $90s
> yet, though it's been a close call many, many times! :'D

You're totally sounding like a 10 on the motivatability scale to me!
:) You're just being super cautious and prudent about mitigating the
inherent stress in beeminding, like we recommend in
blog.beeminder.com/burnout

> I don't know how that compares with the average amount of money paid per
> customer, but I thought it would be interesting to mention. From what I can
> tell, I've been a customer since 04/2012.

Yup, and I just checked among the 677 people who've been beeminding as
long or longer than you and the average is $150, with 125 people at $0
and 9 people above $2k.


--
http://dreev.es -- search://"Daniel Reeves"
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com