I set up Beeminder recently and it’s been helping me make progress on a few things:
Going rockclimbing once a week. I’m using this to track how much I climb every week, but me doing this can mostly be attributed to Roger and I committing to do it together on a specific day every week.
Doing homework / studying for about 8 hours per week. I’m hoping this will eventually cause me to spend slightly more time on schoolwork than is absolutely necessary to do my homework; I’m still calibrating how much time I should aim for per week.
Doing a weekly review every week. Doing this made me feel WAY better this week. I’ve set up a GTD system with an Incompletes note in Evernote (so I can update it whenever I have my phone on me), and knowing that I have a safe place to collect all of the nagging tasks I have to deal with and a way to know when I really need to deal with them has made me feel a lot more in control of things.
I’ve also set a habit of, when I’m deferring tasks, to just give myself one or two Big Action Items per day; this makes it a lot easier for me to focus on things. The combination of this, plus tracking my homework time and doing a weekly review, should hopefully allow me to get enough sleep every night; I’ve been doing quite well at this so far, with 9 hours almost every night. (It doesn’t hurt that I have a particularly late schedule this semester, though, so hard to tell exactly what’s causing this.)
I also tried out Fitocracy. I still generally update it whenever I do something active, but the amount of that has lessened since the school year started, and I don’t really have enough free time to think impulsively, “I want some Fitocracy points, I’m going to go exercise.” (I get TONS of points for rockclimbing every week, though.)
What do you use to log time? I expect that you could just write down, but what’s been keeping me from logging study time has been a good, clean implementation. Perhaps I ought to just put in the 30 minutes to work out some sort of implementation and try to make it habitual.
Also! I’m also on Fitocracy and I don’t (yet) see the points as too big a motivator, but I use Foursquare to check in at the gym when I do go, and that does sometimes make the difference.
I set up Beeminder recently and it’s been helping me make progress on a few things:
Going rockclimbing once a week. I’m using this to track how much I climb every week, but me doing this can mostly be attributed to Roger and I committing to do it together on a specific day every week.
Doing homework / studying for about 8 hours per week. I’m hoping this will eventually cause me to spend slightly more time on schoolwork than is absolutely necessary to do my homework; I’m still calibrating how much time I should aim for per week.
Doing a weekly review every week. Doing this made me feel WAY better this week. I’ve set up a GTD system with an Incompletes note in Evernote (so I can update it whenever I have my phone on me), and knowing that I have a safe place to collect all of the nagging tasks I have to deal with and a way to know when I really need to deal with them has made me feel a lot more in control of things.
I’ve also set a habit of, when I’m deferring tasks, to just give myself one or two Big Action Items per day; this makes it a lot easier for me to focus on things. The combination of this, plus tracking my homework time and doing a weekly review, should hopefully allow me to get enough sleep every night; I’ve been doing quite well at this so far, with 9 hours almost every night. (It doesn’t hurt that I have a particularly late schedule this semester, though, so hard to tell exactly what’s causing this.)
I also tried out Fitocracy. I still generally update it whenever I do something active, but the amount of that has lessened since the school year started, and I don’t really have enough free time to think impulsively, “I want some Fitocracy points, I’m going to go exercise.” (I get TONS of points for rockclimbing every week, though.)
What do you use to log time? I expect that you could just write down, but what’s been keeping me from logging study time has been a good, clean implementation. Perhaps I ought to just put in the 30 minutes to work out some sort of implementation and try to make it habitual.
Also! I’m also on Fitocracy and I don’t (yet) see the points as too big a motivator, but I use Foursquare to check in at the gym when I do go, and that does sometimes make the difference.
Ya, I just write stuff down. Most of my work is on paper anyways, so not much monitoring to be done.