Ramble Goals

Bee and I have been experimenting with micro-habit Beeminder goals. In particular, we coined the name [1] ramble goals for moving a mile [2] a day, as a binary goal, meaning you get a +1 for moving at least a mile. Running a marathon is still just a +1. We also count stationary biking, ironically, which takes all of 3 minutes without breaking a sweat. (We included this to make the bar for doing it very very low.) It’s not very quantified-selfy but the idea is to have this in addition to other fitness goals that track metrics like steps or distance.

Don’t proper distance goals make a binary version superfluous?

No, because you don’t necessarily want to be edge-skating your steps/distance goals all the time. Maybe you even want a long off-season on those goals. But when you do have tons of safety buffer, you don’t want to get too lazy. The mile-a-day goal overcomes the activation energy of getting started. Any time you want a day off, just put in the 3 minutes and be done. If it turns out that once you’re doing it, you don’t mind 17 more minutes for an actual workout, great.

This worked like a charm on me over the winter. I’d get on the stationary bike (technically my real bike on rollers) to get the quick mile out the way and then I’m on a roll (haha) and start setting mini goals like “maybe I’ll keep going till I hit 100 calories” or “till I bring my average speed above 30mph” or any number of meaningless motivators.

The book Atomic Habits calls this a gateway habit, if you use the 2-minute rule. I guess a mile in two minutes is doable on rollers with no resistance setting.

As for what to dial your commitment to — the steepness of the bright red line — Bee and I keep ours at 6-point-something per week. But part of the point is that it hardly matters. You effectively get any day off you want by just putting in the token few minutes.

Metaminding

I think this works great as a run-of-the-mill manual do-more goal. I put what I did in the datapoint comment. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that you can automate this with a Beeminder meta goal if you’re already beeminding something like miles. Set the meta goal up to mirror data from a main miles goal and set the meta goal’s aggday to “satsum” (previously “cap1”). “Satsum” is for “saturated sum” — it plots for each day the sum of any datapoints but capped at a value of 1. That way you have both your “20 miles per week” goal, or however much it is, and an “at least 1 mile per day” goal. You can also set aggday to “unary” (previously “binary”) if you just want to commit to getting any datapoint each day (or most days), no matter how small.

Also if you have an autodata source like Garmin or Strava you can just link that to two goals, and not need to fuss with a meta goal.

Here’s another variation on the concept, from Philip Hellyer: threshold goals. Apparently the inflection point for health benefits from steps-per-day is at 6000 steps. So Philip uses Beeminder’s Make.com integration to add a +1 to his threshold goal if his main steps goal is ≥ 6000 steps.

(But also, don’t overwhelm yourself with too many goals!)

What about autoratchet?

If you’re sufficiently gung-ho, you might prefer to use the autoratchet feature on a goal that just tracks distance walked or run or biked. Or manually ratchet away safety buffer whenever you accumulate too much of it. But the idea is for a ramble goal to be lower stress — less edge-skating — and lower cognitive overhead. You only ever worry about your one ramble per day. You’ll never back yourself into a corner by ratcheting away too much safety buffer on your main mileage goal.

 

Footnotes

[1] In case you like naming goals as much as me, here are alternative names for epsilon-effort, activation-energy-neutralizing goals like this, especially for the case of daily walking:

1. milemark (like a tally mark for hitting a mile, which makes sense for a binary goal)
2. locomote
3. gambol
4. amble
5. minimile
6. stepsilon
7. gaitway
8. solvitur (for solvitur ambulando)
9. ambulocatalysis
10. paripathetic
11. legit (pronounced “leg it”)
12. plodcast
13. cakewalk
14. strollcall
15. bimble (Britishism meaning stroll leisurely)
16. jauntlet
17. meanderthal
18. doorstep (as in stepping out the door)
19. wanderleast
20. heartbeat
21. deminimis
22. scintilla
23. peppercorn
24. linea

I’m embarrassed to say that those started out mine but the most creative-sounding onces are Claude. (I accidentally blurred the line in the above list, by compiling some of it a year or so ago and losing track of which ones we thought of and which the golems thought of. These days I’m more careful. Every word you read on Beeminder that we’re not explicitly attributing to someone or something else is typed by our human fingers.)

[2] We feel dumb being all imperial with “miles” but it is at least linguistically nice: mileage, milemarkers, milestones.