It's Christmas, it's Christmas! Which means holidays, which means horrible problems keeping up with good habits.

I've been thinking about the dynamic between "real" habits and "simulated" Beeminder/HabitRPG habits. You can obviously lose real habits too, but I wonder how simulated the habits formed by Beeminder actually are?

My example is the dream journal. I kept a dream journal practically every single night for a couple of months. Then my Beeminder goal for it ended and I pretty much instantly stopped keeping the dream journal. This is very much how my every attempt at dream journaling has gone before, except this time I lasted way longer ang got way more dreams written down.

I'm not sure if this makes keeping a dream journal a good or a bad example of a simulated habit. I created a new beeminder goal for the journal and started remembering and writing down dreams again the same night. So the skills and the habit (waking up in the middle of the night after a dream to write it down) are still there, but would they have surfaced, if I would have just decided to start doing it again, without involving Beeminder?

Having too many Beeminder-goals seems to clutter your life. Using it for tying your shoelaces is annoying, as it's hard to keep updating about something miniscule, even though not updating will cost you actual money. Still, I have a feeling that I'm just trying to explain fading out Beeminder now, that I've actually start bombing goals more often.

So naturally my teenageish reaction has to be doing the exact opposite. I have to think through all my goals, but I won't really try to cut down on the number of goals or ensure that every goal will be super-special or anything. I'll create a nice tapestry of goals to keep me active in the short and long term. And if this ends up costing me a bundle, so be it. At some point I'm bound to learn to check Beeminder daily even while I'm on holiday and notice I haven't updated in two days and all my daily goals are falling off the ledge.

Happy Christmas! Hopefully this won't end up being just an expensive Christmas present for the Beeminder-people, heh.