This is based on CGP Grey’s Theme System
What I really like about themes and how they work well for me is that they guide actions, but do so more gently than strict incentive systems like beeminder.
They foster a greater sense of ownership and agency. This month has been the month of writing, so whenever I had smth I was considering to write about, I would just write about it. It’s a temporary lowering of the threshold for when you do things.
At the same time, this is the year of Exploration & Discovery, and whilst I was often excited to try new things or even felt bad when not enough new stuff has happened recently, there were also times were my energy was lower, where I wasn’t excited to go out and would have just stayed in instead, passed on the opportunity. But ‘tis the year of Exploration & Discovery, and this is an opportunity to live that and so I did!
The Writing Challenge
As for the writing, including this post I will have published 34 new posts, i.e. 1.133 posts/day on average, although ofc often no posts for some days, which is exactly how I wanted it to be.
2posts/week, no spillover
15mins/day, capped spillover (ratchet back down to max 4 safe days)
And I’ve managed to do it. The idea of using a commitment device (beeminder in this case) was not just bind me all the time and push me forward with a stick, but more to prevent me from losing momentum. In that sense, it worked well: there was a time where I was sort of falling off, but since I knew I committed to this, I ended up writing and publishing 2 more posts that week (bc I thought I had to do 3 per week), which was good.
Sometimes it had adverse effects as well though: there were times where I could’ve written more, started another post or do a little more editing now and just publish, but as I was somewhat ambivalent and on-the-fence about doing it right then, the commitment device pushed me towards not doing it that day and instead waiting for the next one (and then sometimes not doing it then either) since “it wouldn’t cound anyways bc I’ve already reached the maximum 4 safe days”.
I want to experiment more and maybe I will find a better solution to this one, but in the end: policies don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be better than not applying them.
The Stats
Posts: 34
series Exploration & Discovery: 2
tag Transmission: 13
tag Concept: 4
tag trans-ition: 2
tag Writing-November-2025: 1
otherwise untagged: 17
Time spent1: 1219 minutes, i.e. 20h 19min
or about 1.67 posts/h
or about 36 mins/post
Words published:
Footnotes made:
Footnotes
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this might also include some unpublished drafts, as well as editing ↩