Today's 206's and New Year's resolution progress (if you can call it that)

[matt1993]

Three different 206's have shown up today:

- I was thinking about getting a snack, and I happened to look at the clock and it was 2:05 PM, so I waited until it changed to 2:06 to leave the room to get it. (Granted, it was kinda intentional, but it didn't take that long for it to change to 2:06, so I probably would've gotten my snack at 2:06 anyway.)
- I've recently made a program on my calculator that helps me decide what homework to work on first by dividing what I put as the relative difficulty of each homework assignment (with 1 being the difficulty of a math problem) by how many hours I have to work on it.* At one point, for studying for my economics test next Monday, this turned out to be 2.069800282. Even more interesting is the fact that just before I ran the program that time, I had randomly thought about what it would be like if, once I made a PrtSc Land-styled version of this userpic next PrtSc Land Day, Schrödinger's Enya commented on it.
- I'm reading Frankenstein for English class, and I read page 206 today.

Speaking of homework, I've had a LOT of it lately. :(

And now, back to your regularly scheduled pessimism: my New Year's resolutions!

←Week 3 Week 5→

Here's how I did this week on my resolution about doing less than 4 stupid things a day on average:

Jan 22:


Jan 23:


Jan 24:


Jan 25: (After I changed 18 to 25 after copying & pasting last week's HTML, I accidentally hit the 2 key and made it 252...another sign?)


Jan 26:


Jan 27:


*hums the music you hear in Super Mario Bros. when you're running out of time*
Jan 28:


AUTHOR MAYBE CANCELLED?

Key:
orange - amount of stupid things I did up to that day. Sometimes I lose count, but can come up with lower and upper bounds of how many stupid things I did, so the dark orange represents the best-case scenario while it and the light orange together represent the worst-case scenario.
purple - maximum stupid things I could do up to that day and still keep my resolution (i.e. 4 × number of days into the year - 1). It's definitely not gonna show up on its own.
maroon - orange and purple coexisting. A lighter maroon, if it were here, would have the same function as light orange.
The reason there are two graphs for each day is because 1,460 pixels is too wide, so I cut each graph into two 730-pixel-wide graphs.

Once the entire meter is dark orange, I'm gonna post only one day of it, though I will still collect data for the rest of the year and post a final count at the end.

And here's how I'm doing on the resolution about working an hour a day on one of my semi-creative projects:

Jan 22:

Jan 23:

Jan 24:

Jan 25:

Jan 26:

Jan 27:

Jan 28:

*hums Super Mario Bros. running-out-of-time music again*
Key:
green: The dark green shows how many days I had worked on one of my projects up to that day. I succeed if it enters the light green area. (Like that'll ever happen...)
red: shows how many days I had procrastinated and/or been too busy up to that day. I fail if it enters the pink area.

*The formula is different if I'm at school, because then it'd be best to work on short assignments first so I don't have to take them home. In that case, I have it multiply instead of divide, then take the reciprocal of the result.

Po206st t206o yo206ur jour206nal!

Comments

[rovanda.livejournal.com]

Good luck! Do you have any strategies to improve your resolution stats going forward?

[matt1993]

I'm not sure what you mean by "going forward". If that means for the rest of this year, I've pretty much given up on both of them because I've set my goal WAY too high on the first one, and most of the days that I don't work on userpics or anything for the second one are because I had a lot of homework.

If you mean for next year, I'm thinking about having next year's resolutions be similar to this year's, but instead of doing stupid things in general less than 1,464 times (not 1,460 since 2012 is a leap year), I'll separate my stupid things into a few categories and try to reach the same goal in as many of the categories as possible. And for the procrastination one, I'll lower my goal to working for at least one day for every Saturday and Sunday in the year (though I don't necessarily have to work on weekends and not work on weekdays). :)

[rovanda.livejournal.com]

Hmm... if you've already given up because you set the goal too high, why not scrap them both and make new resolutions with a more realistic target? New month's resolutions, rather than new year's resolutions. :-D

Of course, it is our cultural norm to pursue new year's resolutions for only the first couple of weeks (or days, or hours) of the new year, and then make the same ones the next year with the expectation of failure...

I like the idea of focusing on improving your day-to-day experience of life better, though. I figure if there's something you want to change about your life, it's good to work on it *now* rather than waiting for some arbitrary date. :-D

[matt1993]

I haven't really given up on them yet, though - I'm gonna see if, just maybe, I suddenly start doing better at the last minute. After all, I didn't think I'd ever learn how to snap my fingers, but I finally figured it out about a year ago, so... :)

But if I still fail both of these resolutions before December, then yeah, I will start my new resolutions early. :)

[pathvain-aelien.livejournal.com]

You do less stupid things than I do. Way less.

[matt1993]

I've already determined that less than four stupid things a day is too difficult a goal, so next year (or next month, per rovanda's comment), I'm gonna set an easier one. :)