Week Fifty-six! Last week, I made things easier for myself by enabling weekend breaks for a lot of my goals. So, I figured this week I’d try to balance that out by enabling weasel-proofing on a bunch of goals! Including /poetry, /github, and /fitness.
I don’t really enter fake data the way I used to, when I tried using Beeminder a couple years ago, but I definitely still slip up from time to time, and it makes a lot of sense to just not have the temptation there at all.
Speaking of, I was trying out the new Road Editor to adjust the aesthetics of some of my graphs, which I do from time to time (I like to think of it as a morally-grey Bonsai trimming). While doing so, I noticed how much weasel data was in /blogging from long ago, and tried to see what my graph would look like if I fixed it all–since the goal is now weasel-proof’d, I thought I wasn’t able to change the actual numbers.
Whoops, that’s wrong! You can modify data on weasel-proof goals via the Road Editor. And that made me end up derailing four times in a row. And since I had to call 3 of those derails non-legit, I also derailed on my metagoal /derail. So, I guess if you’re super weasel-ly you can still fudge the numbers via the Road Editor.
That was an easily avoidable headache, but the good news is that /blogging has a lot more honest data now.
On a completely different topic, Freakonomics released a podcast episode recently titled Are You Ready for a Fresh Start? which I thought was interesting. One of the key takeaways was that behavioral scientists found people actually do perform changing behavioral patterns better when they utilize an important day–such as New Year’s, the first of a season, their birthday, etc.–but, that birthdays were actually a lot more effective than New Year’s Day!
My own birthday is in just a few weeks, so I’m going to try to use it as a “Fresh Start”. In spite of doing this Bee Journal for over a year, there are still plenty of bad habits I want to get rid of and good habits I want to begin–some not really being able to operate under the same Beeminder framework I’ve used for other things.
Plus, it’s spring! The weather is warming up, and flowers will be sprouting soon. Isn’t that nice? 🌼 🐰🌸 🐝