[repeating this from a couple daily beemails]
First, keep bugging us about the fact that autodata goals still don’t have customizable deadlines. For some integrations it’s easy and we just haven’t gotten to it. For others it’s hard but probably still worth finding a way to do it.
(It’s hard when the app or service doesn’t tell us actual timestamps but just aggregate amounts for each day as they define “day”. It may be that the only real solution is to hack the timezone for the other service. But first we’ll worry about the ones where it’s easy!)
Anyway, but for mandata goals, you should probably stagger the deadlines throughout the day. Quoting myself from the announcement of arbitrary deadlines:
We view it as a big step closer to the holy grail of Beeminder as nannybot that tells you minute-by-minute what you should be doing. You can have deadlines staggered throughout the day so you’re satisfying the beest hour by hour all day long instead of screwing around all day and flying into a frenzy of productivity as midnight bears down. It’s the same problem Beeminder solves so beautifully at a larger timescale – forcing you to make progress day by day on long-term goals – now on a smaller timescale.
Relatedly, I’ve been using an IFTTT recipe to put beemergencies (including time of day) on my google calendar. That would be way better if I could also automatically remove the calendar entries when the beemergency is dispatched.
The reason I’m personally excited about calendar integration is that I’d like to have my Beeminder deadlines staggered throughout the day and I already have systems (like on my Pebble watch) set up to remind me of upcoming appointments. So this way I could get reminded throughout the day of upcoming beemergencies. Currently I’m either in danger of forgetting about a mid-day Beeminder deadline or I have stale calendar reminders warning me of beemergencies that have already been dispatched. Ie, crying wolf.
Related links:
And the Google Calendar API looks nice so I think a proper official integration should be high on our list.