Hi,
I currently use Toggl to track how I spend every minute of my day for different things like “studying”, “eating”, etc. Every Sunday, I manually compare the hour totals of certain priority categories to my target level of hours for that category. For instance, one of my goals is to have less than 25 “fluff” hours (which is a bucket category for time wasters like browsing Reddit) for the week, while another is to have at least 7 hours of “job search”. In order to better keep myself accountable to these goals, I would ideally have everything automated so that I wouldn’t have to manually enter in data every day.
I’m no expert on things like Zapier and IFTTT, but would greatly appreciate the help on how to use them and other tools! Right now, I’m specifically looking for how to:
- Set up automated Beeminder goals for “Do more” and “Do less” in addition to averages. Right now, it seems like Beeminder only uses averages for hour goals, which would only work for a category like “Sleep” where the hour count can stay relatively flat. For my “job search” hours goal it would definitely not be a problem if I surpassed my intended , while for “fluff” hours I also wouldn’t see it as a failure if I had 0 hours in that category for a week.
- Align my Beeminder goals to my weekly schedule. I set my target hours week by week for Monday to Sunday. Daily habit categories are fine to be measured consistently, but prefer to hit my hour quotas in bulk on specific days for things like “Classwork”, and wouldn’t want Beeminder to derail me for getting 0 hours for a couple days in a row on those.
Bonus:
- If there’s no way to do this that’s totally fine, but I have a bad habit of pushing off some of my daily routines to later in the day. This will will usually just make me both less willing to do them later, and more stressed about the routine for all the time I’ve been pushing it off for. With my “Exercise” category, I know that if I do it at 11 AM I’ll feel better/less guilty, but I still push it off! It may be a little too complex, but I would love it if there was a way for me to make it so that daily habits like these would only count if I did them at a specific time of day.
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Hmm, I’m a bit confused. What do you mean by “Beeminder only uses averages for hour goals”? A Toggl-linked goal should just be like a normal do-more goal, and the exact amount you did each day should be entered. (You can also make a Toggl goal into a Do-Less goal with a premium account that has access to custom goals, and it should be the same.) See for instance my goal for my biostatistics class: https://www.beeminder.com/shanaqui/lshtm_biostatistics
…Which isn’t averages, that’s exactly what I’ve entered into Toggl that matches the goal’s settings.
Or is the confusion about the fact that you can be below on one particular day, but be safe because you did a ton the day before? Because all our goals work that way, not just Toggl, and you’d be thinking about wanting to use autoratchet to ensure the exact amount is always required (or allowed, on a Do-Less goal).
I’d love to get to the bottom of what the confusion is there. 
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Hmm, I was specifically referring to the the image below:
Based on what you’re saying, I think I might may just be getting confused by the language. By ‘average’, I assumed that going both too high or below the target goal amount would cause a derail as you would be deviating too much from the target goal. Is it actually just a do more goal and I’m looking too far into things? And how would I make it so that a custom goal pulls data from a specific Toggl project for do less goals?
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I thought I had figured out the process for setting up a “Do less” goal in the way that I wanted, but still no luck 
Here’s what I’ve been doing below, with the problem occurring in step 5
- Set up Toggl goal for “30 units” a week
- Set up initial safety buffer at 3 days, so that the week lines up with my Monday-Sunday schedule
- After creating the goal, set up auto ratchet for 3 days to allow for sizeable off days
- Under settings, converted the goal to a custom goal
- Attempted to convert the custom goal into a “Do less” goal using the following settings:
With the “below, up” configuration, I just get the error “Amount of Respite must be greater than 0” (even though I haven’t touched respite), while “below, down” mysteriously makes it so that the goal won’t derail unless I surpass the collective hour limit of an entire ten year period. Ideally, the final product for this one would make me capped at 30 hours per week, with a significant amount of leeway if I spent most of those hours in just one or two days.
Otherwise, I messed around with creating “Do more” toggl goals and think I’ll be set once I get a good handle on safety days and cumulative totals work.
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Yeah, “average” there just means a standard Do More goal. It does seem surprising that there’s no toggl integration for Do Less! That seems like a pretty straightforward use of Toggl (I also use it for 24/7 time tracking, and I love the beeminder/toggl integration, but I don’t do do-less goals so I’ve never even tried them). This seems like something Support can easily get working though.
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It would definitely be nice! I’ve been using some Do More goals the past few days with great success, so my current plan is to just continue adding on to those until my wasted time hours naturally go down due to other things filling up my schedule.
It would be a little unintuitive, but I also want to see if it would be possible to use a Do More goal to the same effect by making it so that you have to hit a certain number of hours for every project besides the one you don’t want to do. So if I don’t want more than 2 hours of “Fluff” in a day, I would make a goal that required me to get 21-22 hours a day in every other project. This has some obvious issues though, such as with untracked time counting against you, issues with reminders, etc…
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Eek, so with this one you’re encountering a problem where the respite type for a do-less goal has to be set before you can create the do-less goal… meaning you won’t be able to flip over the goal yourself. Can you email support with a link to the goal you want to flip over, so we can set that for you manually? If you link to this thread, that should give us all the context we need!
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It’s definitely in the wishlist from support interactions! It’s not as popular a request as I might’ve expected, though, so if people are keen on it and just sitting on it because they assume we know people want it already, definitely feel free to email us and let us know. Otherwise, at the moment it’s really not looking like a priority to implement.
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I have a Toggl integration with a Do Less goal that I have running through Zapier, but I would love for it to be a native integration. Just +1-ing for this request!
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It’s easier for me to gather via email, if you can send that through! It’d be really helpful to get that included.
(The reason I’m not currently capturing stuff from the forum routinely is that it’s much harder to tell what has already been captured, so we risk capturing the same vote multiple times. I’m hoping to come up with a way to integrate that, but to get stuff in the spreadsheet that support are collating, at the moment it needs to come through email – either directly or through goal deletion feedback works.)
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