It would be great if deadlines times could be changed on goals with integrations.
Take the two use cases for example:
For fitbit steps: 10,000 steps by 00:00. What I do is wait until 10:00PM and then go for an all out run to get to the steps by the deadline. However, this effects my sleep as I am working out at an inopportune time.
For focusmates: 3 focusmates by 00:00. What ends up happening is I wait until 9:00PM and end up setting a session for 9, 10, and 11pm so that I can get my 3 sessions in by the deadline. This means I am spending the rest of the day putting off until the deadline which I know I can reach anyway if I wait until that time.
In short, it would be nice to set earlier deadlines, such as do 10,000 steps by 5:30PM, so that I can avoid putting off tasks to late at night. I could change my time zone to get this functionality, but Iām not sure why it isnāt baked into beeminder considering most integrations work irrespective of the deadline set for them.
Unless Iām misunderstanding something, I think the functionality you want is here Deadline - Beeminder Help? Every goal can have its own independent deadline time, basically, before midnight or even after midnight and yet still counting as a valid entry deadline for the previous day. EDIT: Maybe I misunderstand the issue.
If itās up to us, you can set a custom deadline. Unfortunately, with a lot of integrations we have to use whatever the provider thinks of as āa dayā, which often means midnight deadlines.
(@shanaqui will doubtless add that as a footnote to the deadlines help page in the next improvements!)
Hi @devinat1! Weād love to support changing your deadline for everything, so itās really helpful to hear itās grating on you ā thanks for letting us know. At the moment, I think thereās a worry that if we implement it, itās going to catch some people out, because of the way it works.
What happens is that a non-midnight deadline changes the time your goal considers midnight. For example, if you changed your deadline to 10pm, itād be 25th April until 10pmā¦ and then after 10pm, itād be the 26th. However, you canāt do that kind of thing on data sources like Fitbit or Focusmate, so they keep on reporting the actual calendar date to us. Anything you do after 10pm still gets counted under the 25th ā on the wrong day in Beeminder, in other words.
Thatās not so bad for deadlines that happen earlier than midnight, I think? Though it might be confusing! But itād be really misleading on deadlines after midnight: you wouldnāt derail at midnight, but you wouldnāt be able to add any more data for the 25th after midnight; no matter what you do, itād count for the 26th, and it wouldnāt be able to stop you derailing.
So itāll take some head-scratching for us to figure out a way to make this work, but itās important for us to hear that itās something folks are interested in seeing!
Thanks for the responses. What I have done as a work around for now is to set the time zone to CET, which is 6 hours after my timezone. This means the fitbit and focusmate deadlines are 6pm in my timezone, which is what I wanted.
The drawback to this is I do want some deadlines to be at 12am, but in my case those deadlines I can manually set to 6am to counteract this.
Just to check, have you also set your timezone on those sites to being the same? If not, then there might be some weirdness with the dates. (This is why we donāt really recommend it as a workaround, though mostly if you just accept that you can derail and then technically appear to still be on track, itās fine.)
Is there any update on allowing deadlines to change? I have a habit of starting my fitbit workouts quite late which interferes with my sleep, so this would be a great change.
Weāve added it for a couple of integrations which send us the time that things happened, like Focusmate and Toggl, so there is precedent now for how to make it work in some cases! However I think Fitbit doesnāt or at least didnāt report the time stuff happened, just an aggregated figure for the whole day, and thus so far if we implemented it then the issues I mentioned would still occur. Weād be really wary of implementing it that way, since it would definitely be confusing for people, and completely non-intuitive. People say that often enough about Beeminder as it is, so Iām very cautious about us implementing something that would make it so much worse!
I see, thanks for letting me know, and Iām happy to see that deadlines were added for toggl and focusmate which is useful for morning procrastination.
As a workaround for fitbit, I have made my fitbit activities sync into strava through http://strava.fitbit.com/.
Then I set a strava goal for running a mile with a deadline for 1:00pm, and kept my fitbit goal of zone minutes for 11:59pm. This works great for me since if I run a mile, I usually reach most of the zone minutes, and my issue is getting started running so this should suffice as a workaround.