Derailment dates in your Google calendar

This is just wonderful:

Follow the instructions, and the dates on which you are scheduled to derail
on your Beeminder goals will show up in your Google Calendar. You can just
see at a glance “oh, I need to exercise on or before Friday, but I won’t be
able to do it Friday so I’d best do it on Thursday”.

By a former colleague of mind and all round lovely guy Tom Parker.


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3 Likes

Wow, genius! Though for some of us every day is a beemergency on
everything, making this possibly superfluous. :slight_smile: There are a few
Beeminder goals where some advance warning is valuable for me (for my
personal beeminding, I mean). We actually have an obscure feature
called the Panic Threshold that you can adjust for each goal so, for
example, your blog post graph can show up at the top of your goal
gallery despite being 7 days from derailing. But this is much nicer,
or will be when you can choose which goals have their deadlines
calendared.

Paul, do you know if this automatically stays up to date and if so,
how often it polls?

PS: At first I thought it broke and barfed all over the page but
that’s just the ical link. You grab that URL and add it as a new
calendar in google calendar. The instructions are perfectly clear, I
was just being a typical user and didn’t read them. :slight_smile:

[repeated a version of this in the comments of Tom’s blog]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Paul Crowley ciphergoth@gmail.com wrote:

This is just wonderful:

Things made this weekend: Beeminder failure calendar | Tom's Mad Ideas

Follow the instructions, and the dates on which you are scheduled to derail
on your Beeminder goals will show up in your Google Calendar. You can just
see at a glance “oh, I need to exercise on or before Friday, but I won’t be
able to do it Friday so I’d best do it on Thursday”.

By a former colleague of mind and all round lovely guy Tom Parker.


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

My guess would be that it polls every time you load that URL, so the real
question is how often Google Calendar polls…

On 12 May 2014 00:51, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

Wow, genius! Though for some of us every day is a beemergency on
everything, making this possibly superfluous. :slight_smile: There are a few
Beeminder goals where some advance warning is valuable for me (for my
personal beeminding, I mean). We actually have an obscure feature
called the Panic Threshold that you can adjust for each goal so, for
example, your blog post graph can show up at the top of your goal
gallery despite being 7 days from derailing. But this is much nicer,
or will be when you can choose which goals have their deadlines
calendared.

Paul, do you know if this automatically stays up to date and if so,
how often it polls?

PS: At first I thought it broke and barfed all over the page but
that’s just the ical link. You grab that URL and add it as a new
calendar in google calendar. The instructions are perfectly clear, I
was just being a typical user and didn’t read them. :slight_smile:

[repeated a version of this in the comments of Tom’s blog]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Paul Crowley ciphergoth@gmail.com
wrote:

This is just wonderful:

Things made this weekend: Beeminder failure calendar | Tom's Mad Ideas

Follow the instructions, and the dates on which you are scheduled to
derail
on your Beeminder goals will show up in your Google Calendar. You can
just
see at a glance “oh, I need to exercise on or before Friday, but I won’t
be
able to do it Friday so I’d best do it on Thursday”.

By a former colleague of mind and all round lovely guy Tom Parker.


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com


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The author has confirmed that in the comments. I’d love to hear what
others’ experiences are with this. Should we build it in to Beeminder?

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 12:53 AM, Paul Crowley paul@ciphergoth.org wrote:

My guess would be that it polls every time you load that URL, so the real
question is how often Google Calendar polls…

On 12 May 2014 00:51, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

Wow, genius! Though for some of us every day is a beemergency on
everything, making this possibly superfluous. :slight_smile: There are a few
Beeminder goals where some advance warning is valuable for me (for my
personal beeminding, I mean). We actually have an obscure feature
called the Panic Threshold that you can adjust for each goal so, for
example, your blog post graph can show up at the top of your goal
gallery despite being 7 days from derailing. But this is much nicer,
or will be when you can choose which goals have their deadlines
calendared.

Paul, do you know if this automatically stays up to date and if so,
how often it polls?

PS: At first I thought it broke and barfed all over the page but
that’s just the ical link. You grab that URL and add it as a new
calendar in google calendar. The instructions are perfectly clear, I
was just being a typical user and didn’t read them. :slight_smile:

[repeated a version of this in the comments of Tom’s blog]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Paul Crowley ciphergoth@gmail.com
wrote:

This is just wonderful:

Things made this weekend: Beeminder failure calendar | Tom's Mad Ideas

Follow the instructions, and the dates on which you are scheduled to
derail
on your Beeminder goals will show up in your Google Calendar. You can
just
see at a glance “oh, I need to exercise on or before Friday, but I won’t
be
able to do it Friday so I’d best do it on Thursday”.

By a former colleague of mind and all round lovely guy Tom Parker.


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com


You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the
Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
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To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to
akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


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http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com

I’ve set this up. I’m delighted to see that something like this can be
built using the existing api. (Thanks Tom!)

Despite having dozens of active goals, it turns out that the end dates are
more spread out than I expected. Which makes this a good counterbalance to
the feeling that everything is always on an emergency day. It’s also a good
counterbalance to email fatigue; I’ve turned off email reminders altogether
on most of my goals.

I’ve subscribed to this in my iCloud calendar, and the client-side settings
let me specify the refresh frequency. Non-intuitively, this is on the ‘Get
Info’, rather than on the calendar’s ‘Subscription Settings’.

I think there is some benefit to building this into Beeminder. It would
make it easier to implement filters, so that goals could be explicitly
included or excluded from the calendar feed. More importantly, making goals
visible in the tools that people already use sounds super-important. One of
the hurdles for newbees seems to be checking their graphs regularly; the
current methods of making goals visible don’t work for everyone, or don’t
scale to many goals.

Philip

On 13 May 2014 01:22, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

The author has confirmed that in the comments. I’d love to hear what
others’ experiences are with this. Should we build it in to Beeminder?

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 12:53 AM, Paul Crowley paul@ciphergoth.org
wrote:

My guess would be that it polls every time you load that URL, so the real
question is how often Google Calendar polls…

On 12 May 2014 00:51, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

Wow, genius! Though for some of us every day is a beemergency on
everything, making this possibly superfluous. :slight_smile: There are a few
Beeminder goals where some advance warning is valuable for me (for my
personal beeminding, I mean). We actually have an obscure feature
called the Panic Threshold that you can adjust for each goal so, for
example, your blog post graph can show up at the top of your goal
gallery despite being 7 days from derailing. But this is much nicer,
or will be when you can choose which goals have their deadlines
calendared.

Paul, do you know if this automatically stays up to date and if so,
how often it polls?

PS: At first I thought it broke and barfed all over the page but
that’s just the ical link. You grab that URL and add it as a new
calendar in google calendar. The instructions are perfectly clear, I
was just being a typical user and didn’t read them. :slight_smile:

[repeated a version of this in the comments of Tom’s blog]

On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Paul Crowley ciphergoth@gmail.com
wrote:

This is just wonderful:

http://crazymadideas.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/things-made-this-weekend-beeminder-failure-calendar/

Follow the instructions, and the dates on which you are scheduled to
derail
on your Beeminder goals will show up in your Google Calendar. You can
just
see at a glance “oh, I need to exercise on or before Friday, but I
won’t
be
able to do it Friday so I’d best do it on Thursday”.

By a former colleague of mind and all round lovely guy Tom Parker.


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com


You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the
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For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


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For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
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This is absolutely outstanding!

My fail days are all shown on my google calendar now, makes it more real
for me and easier to plan the week rather than waiting for the emails and
panicking. I may turn off some of the email reminders as Philip suggested.

On Sunday, 11 May 2014 19:57:29 UTC+1, Paul Crowley wrote:

This is just wonderful:

Things made this weekend: Beeminder failure calendar | Tom's Mad Ideas

Follow the instructions, and the dates on which you are scheduled to
derail on your Beeminder goals will show up in your Google Calendar. You
can just see at a glance “oh, I need to exercise on or before Friday, but I
won’t be able to do it Friday so I’d best do it on Thursday”.

By a former colleague of mind and all round lovely guy Tom Parker.


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

People are telling me that google polls the URL once every 24 hours
and there seems to be no reasonable way to get it to check more
frequently. What do people think? I guess that’s ok for goals where
you normally keep multiple days of safety buffer.

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 1:32 AM, boardtc boardtc@gmail.com wrote:

This is absolutely outstanding!

My fail days are all shown on my google calendar now, makes it more real for
me and easier to plan the week rather than waiting for the emails and
panicking. I may turn off some of the email reminders as Philip suggested.

On Sunday, 11 May 2014 19:57:29 UTC+1, Paul Crowley wrote:

This is just wonderful:

http://crazymadideas.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/things-made-this-weekend-beeminder-failure-calendar/

Follow the instructions, and the dates on which you are scheduled to
derail on your Beeminder goals will show up in your Google Calendar. You can
just see at a glance “oh, I need to exercise on or before Friday, but I
won’t be able to do it Friday so I’d best do it on Thursday”.

By a former colleague of mind and all round lovely guy Tom Parker.


You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
“Akratics Anonymous” group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == http://beeminder.com