Lately I've been fumbling with Beeminder way more than I would like to or would have expected. I have actually ended up paying them proper money, which is shocking.

Shocking!

I guess this is exactly how Beeminder is supposed to work. First it makes you pay and then scares you by the next, even higher payment. Failing a goal actually hurts, so you better not let it happen again. Also, having a goal fail is sort of an existential crisis for me personally. As in, something to get angry over and to inspire a vengeful show of force, Zarathustra-style.

So next up I'll be pushing every Beeminder goal into the green. Beeminder has a sort of a traffic light system, so your goals can be red or orange or blue or green, depending on how much you can slack off before you go off the track. I've been hovering chronically around orange and red with most of my goals, but that always carries the risk of failing a bunch of goals just because you happened to end up in a bar that night and didn't remember that you had promised to Beeminder that you'd shine some shoes tonight.

I'll have to tweak some of the goals a bit to be able to pull this off. If my Beeminder goal is to eat vitamins seven days a week, I can't get that goal to green ever. I'm always the same amount of time from failing, except if I really fall off the track. So I'm toning down some of the goals so that if I perform according to my goal (eat vitamins each and every day of the week), I'll advance towards a green goal.

I'm not really calculating this in more detail. I'll give you an update in about two weeks. It'll probably take me at least that long to make any headway in the more long-term goals.

Put 'em up!