Week Fifty-three! Things have been going really great for me the past few weeks, productivity-wise. I’m finally starting to chip away at the seemingly immortal list of things that I’ve been meaning to do forever, now.
The biggest update I have is that I’ve been using Noom for the past two weeks on their trial period. Part of using it was logging my meals for caloric count, and to my suprise, it’s both easy and really helpful! So, I’m going to be archiving /foodlog and start a new goal called /nutrition, where I’ll log my caloric intake via Fitbit from now on.
Anyways, the psychological tricks that they give you throughout the regimen are helpful, and honestly it’s sort of puzzling to me why they’re strictly just applied to physical health. This seems to be very common, where when people want to improve themselves or their life, they focus on one particular facet. As I’ve said, I believe taking a holistic approach is what’s been keeping me so successful, each system helps keep one another going.
Of course, that’s why I like Beeminder so much, it’s just a blank canvas to track whatever you want! Speaking of, time for some responses.
But I don’t believe that akrasia is something that can be healed from, the way a broken ankle can - I think it’s a human limitation that we use tools to overcome, and I haven’t seen much evidence that we can “heal” it with Beeminder. I see Beeminder as a tool to fight akrasia, and if you take away the tool, you lose its benefits. –@zedmango
I’m rather conflicted about this–on one hand, I completely recognize within myself the almost-obvious permanence of akrasia, but I also recognize how it has (extremely slowly) diminished the longer I push myself to be disciplined.
There are many people out there (thankfully) that don’t require any sort of external tools or motivations to just do the work. They get up each day, without complaint, and immediately do what they ought to.
What separates me from them? Is it something unchangeable, biological, and rigid? Or am I capable of self-rewiring and transforming my behaviour to such an extent?
I honestly have no idea what the answer to that is–I am a layman when it comes to the psychology, or perhaps neurology. People that have successfully changed how they acted completely still have used external tools, be it medication or a therapeutic practice like CBT. Sorry, that descant got completely off-track. 😅
My actual argument for eventually quitting Beeminder is simply to figure out a way to continue being productive and living meaningfully that’s product-agnostic. (Which I talked about way back in entry #2) Simply because something could happen, where I could no longer use Beeminder, and I need to figure out a way to continue regardless of that, and prepare myself for it–hence Beeminder-as-a-Framework.
I think that after another year, in February 2022, if things are still going well, I’ll experiment with stopping the use of Beeminder altogether but still having a weekly accountability journal. I feel like that amount of times would make the attempt legitimate, and not “quitting and then subsequently getting super lazy and ignoring everything”.
But if it’s a single point a day, or autodata, then yeah, there’s no downside to keeping guardrails around. … Those goals are strictly road signs, but they’re no less powerful for that! –@lanthala
On the complete other hand, this is also an excellent point. Using Beeminder isn’t actually that big of a deal–these are all goals that I’ve created myself. I think this image below aptly describes it:
