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Journal.Kim —A Metasystem Experiment

It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day, that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.
—Bojack Horseman



Fifty-Two: Framework Beeminder

 | #fifty-second-week

Week Fifty-two! Finally, reaching a canonical year a few weeks late due to my usual tardiness. I decided to do a bit more of a qualitative write-up for my year review on LinkedIn and my main blog.

Which made me beg the question–should I be aiming to be more metric/quantitatively-focused, or qualitative and anecdotal? I’m leaning more towards the former than the latter, since sticking to the numbers help me stick to talking about Beeminder, instead of wandering off about other things in my life which I often do. 😛

One thing that reviewing this past year has taught me is that I need to review myself much more often! There are so many helpful things I take note of, only totally forget because I wrote about it weeks or months ago. Often, I feel as though I am a squirrel that plants useful acorns for later, and then forget, and hopefully they can at least become trees for others, hah!

Perhaps it’s a fear of realizing I haven’t really made much process, or just not wanting to cringe at past-me, but whatever the case, I need to get over it.

Speaking of excuses–I’m putting a stop to them. If I’m late, I’m late. If I derail, I derail. There’s no need to try to rationalize each and every setback I have, and it deters from me being honest–which is the entire point of this journal and using Beeminder itself.

Overall, I feel as though I need to take Beeminder more seriously–which might sound silly, but it’s true. When dealing with manual goals, I often just add data-points when I’m in the red without much regard. I had a dozen blank data points in /books because I just shrugged it off and told myself I’d fill them in later. As well as deeply thinking about the tradeoffs of tracking by particular metrics, etc.

That kind of irreverence really does not help me. I need to look at Beeminder-as-a-Meditation, more than Beeminder-as-an-App. In fact, it’s really more like Beeminder-as-a-Framework: It’s not really about the data or Beeminder at all, but rather revolving life around productive and helpful actions and intentions, rather than nebulous and ambiguous tasks in solitude that are washed away at the end of each day like sandcastles in the tide.

But then the question arises: When do you stop beeminding things? 🤔💭 If something becomes second-nature and effortless, should I remove the goal? Maybe I’m being too sentimental about the data and history, and that the obvious answer is yes, because Beeminder has an obvious and almost strict function and intention.

When I look at my own archive page, all the goals there either stopped working due to a tech issue, or a personal failing. All of the goals that I’ve set up for myself so far have been created with the intention of having a lifetime permanency. Maybe that’s been a bit of a blindspot for me, and I’m kinda using Beeminder as a crutch even when I don’t really need it.