I’ve built a tool to schedule Beeminder goals with different rates for different days of the week. Check it out here.
Beescheduler lets you schedule different rates for your Beeminder goals based on the days of the week. I wrote it so I could focus on one project Monday - Wednesday and different ones on Thursday and Friday. This is much better than doing a tiny amount on all of them every day.
It’s sort of like a much fancier version of the built-in “weekends off” feature.
For another example, you could write 500 words on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and take the rest of the week off. Or go for short runs every other weekday and longer ones on the weekends. Or whatever else you can think of.
Caveats:
This is beta. I’ve been using it, in various incarnations, since last October, but this is the first time I’ve given it to anyone else. It may well derail you, or otherwise break things. If that happens, you can email me at beescheduler@echonolan.net and/or contact Beeminder’s support. I can fix things with the scheduler, but some things aren’t fixable without the special privileges they have. Worst case you can revoke Beescheduler’s permissions in your account settings. It won’t be able to do anything after that.
It interacts poorly with other things that edit your roads. Specifically, retroratchet won’t preserve the day-of-week structure. I have no idea what will happen if Beescheduler and “weekends off” are on simultaneously.
It hasn’t been tested with anything other than “do-more” goals.
Let me know if you end up using it and how it goes.
EDIT: This is a wonderful thing and thanks for sharing it!
What would be a great, albeit maybe complicated addition to this, is if I could say “I want to work only Friday on this, but don’t ask me about the amount”. I could see this implemented by simply providing a way of marking the “off-days” instead of saying explicitly what amounts I want for each day. This would be great for any goals that are monthly or bi-weekly, or whatever.
An example: I have a very cute little hamster and have to clean regularly, but not really every week (more like every 11 days or something like that). So the goal is a monthly goal (three cleanings a month). If I could somehow easily say “make me do this only on weekends and only in step with my overall commitment” this would be wonderful.
Hi @enolan – thanks for sharing this tool with the community! It’s a great idea.
I’ve just taken it out for a spin, and I have a datapoint for you, for whatever it’s worth.
I started a new goal I’d like to do twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. First, I set it up in Beeminder as a 2x-a-week do-more goal. Then I made a few tweaks:
– (cosmetic) set the x-axis to display through the end of this year
– (functional) build in an upcoming break using the road editor
– (functional) build in a ‘soft end’ at the end of the year using the road editor (ie, set rate to zero going into 2018)
(This is my standard procedure for new goals.) That gave me this, as expected:
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(Note: this is actually the road editor for a different goal I started today; I didn’t think to grab a screenshot before enabling Beescheduler. Just imagine a “2” where the "1"s are in the rates.) Then I told Beescheduler to schedule the 2 events to happen on Mondays and Thursdays:
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Possibly this is because my goal should be set up to use “day” as its rate value (which is probably worth mentioning in the Beescheduler header, if so). Or possibly it’s something else? (Whatever the cause, it does seem incorrect that Beescheduler should change my final date…)
To test that, I:
– deactivated Beescheduler on the goal;
– reverted the goal’s road (using the UNDO ROAD EDIT button) to get back to my initial state;
– switched to a daily rate value.
That gave me my original graph and this road editor:
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Assuming the Beescheduler codebase is lost forever, would the Bee Team consider a “weekends only” setting? I know it goes against the Anti-Settings Principle, but I can imagine it as simply a third radio button under the “Weekends” setting section.
I have more details, it works but not for a specific goal, which is the only one I was interested in making it work for. Is recreating the goal the only hope I have for that?
@enolan I’ve been having trouble with Beescheduler the past few months. It’ll say authorization failed, then when I click try again, it does the same thing, and the URL changes to “[…]/?error=redirect_uri_mismatch&error_description=Parameter+redirect_uri+does+not+match+registered+URI”
For a while, I could get around it by removing the authorization for it in Beeminder, then opening Beescheduler in an incognito Chrome window (Firefox is my main browser; private browsing did not work), and re-authorizing. Today this no longer works.
Please could you fix this? I love beescheduler and use it for probably a dozen goals. Thanks!
