Many of you know @malcolm (Malcolm Ocean) as the creator of Complice, which you can think of as a complement to Beeminder for less quantifiable goals. Malcolm is also the main person behind our Beekeeper program. Complice has official Beeminder integration now (!) which we’ll make a more official and general announcement about soon. (Teaser: I’ve been dabbling with Complice for a long time and finally am beeminding entering my daily intentions.)
But first, one of the most useful Beeminder integrations in Complice is pomodoro tracking, using Complice’s built-in pomodoro timer. You can beemind total pomodoros or send just the count for a particular Complice goal to a particular Beeminder goal. It’s quite well done. Random nice feature: the live timer is shown in the title of the tab in your browser so you don’t have to figure out how to keep the timer visible while you’re working.
Eager to hear what people think! And huge thanks to Malcolm for building this!
PS: Past forum posts on tracking pomodoros (hover over the links for my commentary):
Complice is using the Beeminder API to send +1’s to Beeminder goals that you specify (in Complice settings) when you do various things on Complice. @malcolm did all this himself (not counting the bugs in the API he uncovered that he kindly spurred us to fix – see recent UVIs) but we very much intend to make Complice an official integration so you can choose Complice-specific goal types when creating goals on Beeminder. In the meantime, just create Do More goals like usual and then Complice lets you pick the goal to link to.
@dollarflipper Hmm, yeah I agree that $120 just for pomodoro tracking would be excessive. I think that the Complice system as a whole is worth that much though, if it’s worth using at all (and you aren’t totally broke).
Thanks @malcolm! I’ve been trying out Complice right now, even though I am also (still) pretty much totally broke. So far, it’s been the most help out of any tool [stack] for helping me take the steps to eventually alleviate the brokeness, even more so than Beeminder alone. Beeminder can tell me that I should plan out my day, but it doesn’t help me actually do it. That’s where Complice comes in.
I haven’t set up a Complice Pomodoro Beeminder goal because my activities don’t always involve being at a computer. But when I am at the computer, I almost always use the timer. It was easy once I stopped deleting my completed Pomodoros and actually read the blog post telling me how to use the timer. But now I’m seeing that I can track Pomodoros for specific goals (e.g. with activities where will probably be at a computer), so I’ll try it out starting tonight, along with the entry and submission Beeminding.
The best way I’ve found to use Complice so far is in conjunction with Timeful for iOS. This prompts me to be realistic about time when adding my tasks to Complice, and also in scheduling activities in line with my goals in Timeful. To make this work, I have to make sure that the intentions I enter in Complice and the todos I schedule in Timeful have a close to 1-1 correspondence. While this is a bit more manual than I’d like, it also helps me enforce a conscientiousness that doesn’t come naturally to me, probably thanks to my largely untreated ADHD.
So: if Complice continues to be valuable, it should help me increase my income by much more than the $120/year price tag. With the Beeminder integrations, it might just become the most valuable thing I’ve Beeminded. We’ll see. In any case, I’m earnest to see where the two weeks of the free trial can take me (and then I’ll probably have to go hunt for some nickels and dimes in the car or something.)
Anyway, thanks for making Complice, and building Beeminder functionality into it early-on.
I highly recommend other people who’ve been struggling with workflow and various tools to give it a shot. You may also find it improves how you use the other tools.
I’ve been testing Complice for a bit over two weeks and I just wanted to make a public note to @malcolm for the great job on the service. There are some small things to fix but it can certainly help a lot of people. Ultimately, the price is a bit high for me as I didn’t go into the process of doing weekly reviews (which i think is a big part of the system) and I also didn’t beemind the pomodoros as I already beemind RescueTime. Still, the concept of daily declaring intentions and reviewing them at the end of the day is a great idea.
I’m now trying out OmniFocus 2 (had tried the first version a few years back but it didn’t stick to me) in combination with Eggscellent (which integrates with OF2).
I haven’t read that mail. Probably I have skipped it accidentally.
If there is interest in KanbanFlow instead of Trello, I have wrote a vb.net program to check my pomodoro counts every 5 minutes that has been done inside KanbanFlow and email the most recent count (if it has changed from the last time sent) to pomodoro beeminder goal.
The program should be run on a pc, but I am trying (i.e., struggling) to translate the vb.net code into asp.net and running it as a server app in appharbour for free. It seems the asp.net works fine on my local test but there is some weird error when I push it to appharbour. Microsoft Azura was better in receiving the code and compiling without errors, but did not work correctly there inspite the zero error of compiling in Azura. The app was running in the Azura dashboard , but did not send any emails to beeminder. And I don’t like Azura since there is no free option there. So most likely I will keep trying with appharbour.
Anyway the vb.net code now works well on my pc for around 1 month now. If there is interest, I will make a new forum post for pomodoro beeminding automatically with KanbanFlow
P.S.: KanbanFlow worked much better for me comparing to trello. Since it has an integrated pomodoro watch and pomodoro statistics which works natively with the kanban tasks. You can get on overview on KF here and here.
By the way, KF has an API but it does not support pomodoro counts. So I had developed my code to open the webpage of my kanban board, automatic login and parse the html and read the pomodoro points in the upper right corner of the page. That was my only way to automate it, but it works perfectly.
Coding is not my profession (hobbyist), do not expect a well designed code, but you can make your changes and enhancements. Maybe you can even use it as a guidance to code a similar code in your own preferred language.
Any KanbanFlow user here who would like using this code?
