So my routine has been in flux recently, which means I’ve been forgetting to check beeminder some days. This has meant a lot of “derailed” goals that were only derailed because I didn’t even notice they were due – I just got hit with $40 dollars of derails last night that would have been completely trivial for me to complete, if only I had seen them.
Obviously beeminder has alerts, but I turned those off years ago because I have a lot of goals, and getting repeatedly reminded of all of them quickly becomes frustrating noise. What I want is one set of zeno alerts letting me know I have any beeminder goal due that night – basically, just an alert informing me to check beeminder or else. I’m pretty sure I could do exactly this with a meta goal, but now that there are no more $0 goals, that would mean getting double charged for every day I miss a goal; an interesting motivational technique but not one I want to add to my plate.
Is there an easy solution to this problem that I’ve missed? I’ve tried turning on alerts for one single goal, but as last night showed, that goal can be not due while everything else is due. I also have the beeminder widget on my (android) phone’s home screen, but it turns out I don’t always check my home screen before bed. And I have a post-it note on my desk reminding me to check beeminder, but that only works if I sit down at my desk sometime in the evening. In general, I’ve found that any static reminder tends to get ignored over time, as my brain notices that it’s often unrewarding (“yep, nothing due tonight”) and thus tunes it out.
I have a little python script that scans all my goals at 6pm, and puts up a big alert on my computer screen if it sees anything in the red: might that sort of thing work for you? (Maybe you’re not close enough to your screen in the evening, or something)
I’ve got loads of little scripts that I’ve created to do various things! Some I use quite a lot are:
one to create a monthly goal, i.e. a goal starting on the 1st of a month with an end date on the last day of the month.
one that creates flat spots like the weekends-off flag does, but for other days of the week (so I can have goals that run Sunday through Thursday, say, with Fri/Sat off)
one that adds a datapoint if I have overdue to-do items in Todoist (optionally, overdue by more than N days)
Right now I’m experimenting with one that creates staircase-like goal lines, for example flat Mon-Sat, then a jump up each Sunday. This is for things like weekly items that should happen every Sunday, and you can ignore for the rest of the week. Beeminder’s approach of saying “well we’ll pretend you’re doing 1/7th of it each day” is a known compromise, so I’m trying it see how this approach might work.
I set this up for myself using a node service hosted on Render.com and a corresponding Telegram bot. But I wouldn’t characterize this solution as simple.
This isn’t a helpful reply yet but I wanted to mention what I think is the long-term solution to this (see our incipient spec for way-too-gory details). Namely, a more principled and anti-wolf-crying system of zeno alerts. The idea is to only ever tell you about one goal at a time and to incorporate user-specified estimates of how long it takes to make a quantum of progress on any given goal. I think this may be exactly what you’re asking for?
One concern I would have (about this highly hypothetical imaginary system) is what if I’m in bed by the time panic time arrives? Most of my deadlines are (deliberately) after my bedtime. Should I just always fudge my time estimate so that everything takes at least a couple hours? Actually I probably would anyway, since otherwise I might be, say, out of the house and unable to water my plants during my authentic panic window.
Thinking about it in more detail, I’m not sure a panic window system would work for me, since I also have other, non-beeminder tasks that need to get done (“tonight I need to make my daughter’s lunch”, “tonight my daughter is sick”, etc) and would infringe on my actual time available for dealing with last-minute, drop-everything-and-do-this beeminder panics. I’m overall perfectly fine with the concept of zeno alerts, since they accommodate all the above scenarios comfortably; I just want a max of one set of alerts.
(Edit: another argument against just-in-time alerts is that would require me to be instantly available to my phone/watch/email or whatever is sending the alert, which is something I try not to be in the evenings)
So I tried something similar, with a script (I think someone on the forums had written it) that scanned all my goals and if any were due, would turn a light on (thus I couldn’t turn all the lights out if I had a goal due). The script itself worked fine, but I could not for the life of me get the cron job to run it working
