Hello,
I’ve setup 12+ goals totaling to about 6 hrs of time. Every now and then something comes up that is not an emergency and I am staring at a potential $20+ charge near the end of day. And over time I have realized I can’t be in the green or blue or yellow for daily goals. I could put in fewer goals each 2-5m but that only covers the smaller goals. How do I deal with this?
Thanks
If I understand the question correctly that you found that you are not motivated to do a goal unless something is at stake today (“I have realized I can’t be in the green or blue or yellow for daily goals”) but having all of them, with quite a large sum at stake in total, is also overwhelming - if that’s the question, I have a meta goal specifically for this reason. So I am obliged to push every daily goal by a certain amount “on average”, but can choose what day to do more of what and only the meta itself and a few of the actual goals are in fact at risk of derailing on a daily basis.
One strategy that works for some people here is to set a ridiculously shallow slope on the bright red line — e.g. doing one pushup — so that on real beemergency days it doesn’t take that much time to despatch them.
The idea being that you’re unlikely to stop at just one pushup, most of the time, and that the goal will get you over the threshold friction of actually starting.
Usually paired with the autoratchet and weekends-off features to make every (week)day a red day.
Another strategy is to use the nonzero aggregation method so that any number of pushups is counted as a +1 for the day. Some folks use both of these methods and the Beeminder-as-datasource goal type so that they only enter pushups once.
Some folks get good mileage out of redefining what a +1 means: e.g. flossing at least one tooth, or touching the gym door. If the floss breaks, ah well, but most of the time you carry on around the whole mouth, and most of the time you go into the gym and do something more workout-like than sitting at the bar.
Yes, you understood my question correctly. I’ll study that a bit to get a sense of what you are suggesting here. Will come back if I have questions. Thanks
Thanks for sharing. A few of my goals are like that and they have been mostly green. Given the number of times a week I am close to derailing, I should have only those goals that I can work on in spite of personal emergencies. Maybe I should try this with more of the goals.
Btw I didn’t catch this part. Is there a doc that talks more about it?
Thank you. @scarabaea reply also makes sense now.
What @philip suggests is also a good idea to apply to your situation, but you actually interpreted my suggestion correctly the first time. I referred to a meta goal that collects information from a number of goals. One of the technical solutions to implement that is indeed outlined in that thread of mine that you mentioned (but there’s no need for fancy scripts to implement that; I kept a meta goal manually for about 8-9 years before I decided to automate it).
A single Metaminder goal can actually collect data from multiple goals, as well! The first one can be set up in goal setup, but other goal data sources can be added via their webhook sections in settings (this is covered in the help doc, but I can talk in more detail if someone needs).
I’m like you–I edge skate pretty much all my goals. To compensate I cap my pledges at $5 or $10 for almost all my goals.
I also set my deadlines strategically to avoid burnout. So most of my personal deadlines are due at 8:30am, most of my work deadlines are due around noon or early afternoon, and a few miscellaneous goals have deadlines at other times based on what makes sense for them.
Of course, all of this is very personal to you–what pledge levels are personally motivating to you, but not overly stressful if you have lots of goals in the red every day? And what times of day do you work best for different types of goals, thereby suggesting when you should set your deadlines? It will probably take some experimentation to figure out.
Also, not sure how long you’ve been using Beeminder. But it’s probably best to start slowly at first. Fewer goals to start, and keep your commitments conservative while you’re figuring things out.
The time of day deadlines are for us to manage by setting a goal accordingly, right? Beeminder knows about only end of day deadlines, afaik.
Yes, I’m a newbie. And I’ve also figured the hard way that it’s best to start slowly with fewer goals mostly touching the gym door types 
Okay. The meta goals are still too meta for me . I’ll steer clear of those for now. Thanks anyway.
I found a combination of slow rate and autoratchet to work well for daily goals.
So I have to workout technically only 3 times per week but the most I can stop between workouts until I am in the red is two days. So on a good week, I am always in the blue or yellow. On a bad week I have enough flexibility to recover without derailing or missing workouts.
I try not to add too many goals and look for ways to combine them. It gets overwhelming. If I am adding I try to add one or two goal per week, even after a vacation reenabling old goals.
Also setting all my deadlines midday worked better for me because I tend to have more energy in the morning. Also can enter points for the previous day in one go.
When I started out, I had the same basic instinct to push myself with big commitments, but I have learned since to focus on consistency and finding a sustainable rate.
Ah, useful to hear you had this impression! No, many goals can have deadlines at any time you like – you can set this up via the settings section of the goal, or adjust many at once on the reminders page.
The exceptions would be goals that are linked with certain integrations which don’t allow us to aggregate the data differently from midnight-to-midnight (or more rarely, some other time, like 6pm-to-6pm, or 4am-to-4am). So there are some you can’t change, but many you can!
I used to have this problem a lot. I have mostly gotten it kinda under control by beeminding urgency load. (cf this thread, although my code works a bit differently)
The essence is spot on and the caveat is any deadline as in a precise hour and minute of the day save for the time between 6am and 7am.
sources:
deadline (number): Seconds by which your deadline differs from midnight. Negative is before midnight, positive is after midnight. Allowed range is -17*3600 to 6*3600 (7am to 6am).My guess is that this is so to provide a deadline with a ‘before’ or an ‘after’ (midnight) flag.
This is also a constant challenge for me, and I haven’t found a decent way around it!
But I think I’ve found that, no matter what my rates are, I’m always derailing at about the same frequency. I’ve had times when my rates are set really low and times when my rates are set super high, and I’m always riding that line and derailing about the same amount (I think!).
I also beemind two meta-goals related to this:
They each helped at first but lately they don’t seem to help much at all… The novelty wears off! But I still find them helpful for historical visibility.
I also tend to have a lot of goals due daily or semi-daily. What has helped me is using the API to see a lot of Beeminder info to a database website called Airtable.
Once it is in Airtable I am able to add estimated time to complete a goal (e.g. dishes = 30 minutes). So I can easily see how long my goals will take in aggregate.
Ha it also allows me to use Title instead of Slug which I think is way more readable.
Dang, nice work. Looks a lot like @mary’s Time Stream.
