I love cycling, but not all the time outdoors. So a while back I bought an indoor cycling bike. Used it for a while and then it sat there looking back at me.
As part of my review of my ‘lose weight/get fit’ objective I decided I needed to fix this, and after some research settled on a Beeminder set up that seems to work. Thought I’d share it here if anyone else was on the look out for something - you can skip ahead to the end if you wish.
Essentially the task was how to Beemind the activity (pedalling on the bike) and not the outcome (bike ride).There are plenty of ways to do the latter, but none of them that you couldn’t fake at 11:30pm sat on the sofa (including cycle for ‘x’ number of minutes).
So my set up had to be robust. In the end I got a Wahoo Cadence/RPM sensor. They are designed for any type of bike (including indoor). Effectively you strap it to the crank arm, link it by Bluetooth to the Wahoo App and once synced you start a ride on the app to record the time and cadence.
The output can be synced up with a range of different cycling apps, and after running a cross check of all the major ones (MapMyRide, RideWithGPS, Garmin etc.) against 1) a link with Wahoo 2) a link with either IFTTT, Zapier or Integromat and 3) the availability of data output of both time and average cadence, I ended up with the following set up:
- Record a ride with Wahoo
- Sync with Strava
- Run a Zapier 3 part Zap that 1) pulls in the moving time and average cadence data from Strava, 2) multiplies the moving time with the average cadence 3) pops the result as a value into a Beeminder goal.
Seems to be working well to not only keep my average cadence up, but also pedal for a long time.
P.S. Shout out to Complice (recently started using) which undoubtedly, through the power of intentions and pomos, made this happen.
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Complice founder here! Would you say that having Complice tracking your less numerical goals goals specifically helped encourage/motivate you to design your Wahoo+Strava+Beeminder system?
(For a long time I’ve gestured at this being a thing that Complice is good at, as in “you might have some tracking app, but where do you track if the tracking app is actually working at achieving the underlying goal and reflect on what to do instead?” This seems like the best clear case study of this happening.)
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I think what worked was that I hate starting things, because I never know when I’ve done ‘enough’. The 25min pomo is a good enough ‘enough’ to allow me to start doing things bit by bit over a number of days.
Second, in life, unlike work, you are strategist, planner and executor all in one so Complice helps to break down those roles in a sensible way through the goals, priorities, intentions then review approach (or as I’m using it vision, strategy, action/sprint, scrum).
I had Todoist before and I always lost track of ‘why’ I was doing a task when I get round to doing it (a task without a vision is just a chore), plus I hadn’t really broken it down in any level of detail to be able to figure out how to start.
The Complice approach seems to help (with an intuitive structure) - particularly with those big chunky macro-objectives that just need a bit of progress day to day to move things in the right direction.
Lastly, the general problem I find with doing my own ‘Life Goals’ is no one is paying me to do them, hence Beeminder.
The thing that helps is having a multitude of Beeminder goals linked to Complice (in essence KPIs for each ‘role’ you have to play): dailies, %complete, pomos, intentions, reviews, outcomes etc. - this gives enough touch points so that you are fully accountable for all the roles you need to play, important as each role enables the other.
Hope that helps.
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