Can Beeminder help me get out of bed each day?

Yes! This sounds great! Thank-you. :blush: I will look into setting this up.

Any idea on what I could do on days I’m away? I go and stay with my sister in London sometimes, so it’d be great if I could adapt it for that.

No problem! You can easily schedule a break within Beeminder. You have to do that 7 days in advance (the akrasia horizon) or if (for whatever reason) this doesn’t work for you, simply email / chat with support and let them know. They can put in a flat spot on your road and give you a break regardless. They are very nice people :slight_smile:
@shanaqui can tell you more about how that works, especially in combination with weaselproofing.

Oh and I just realised something! Not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier but you can of totally set up a Runkeeper goal and just set the deadline to when you want to have finished your 2km walk!
I was so focussed on the location aspect and getting out of bed that I just completely missed that. This should be even better for you, right?

You could use IFTTT to log when you exit an area! Having an iPhone does make the timing part more difficult, but it should still be doable :slight_smile: I’d be happy to write up a walkthrough of how to set this up if that would be useful!

Edit: Oops, I just saw @phi’s reply! And I definitely second using the Runkeeper goal, since that will work at any location :slight_smile: I had a similar setup with penalties for not meeting my Fitbit step goal by a certain time, worked great!

Welcome to our strange world!

If you’re willing to spend a little money you could look at https://flic.io/ . As in, put your Flic button somewhere out of reach from your various couches and beds and then have a goal that requires you to push the button before some time in the morning. Not sure if that counts as “self reporting” but it’s at least off your phone?

How concerned are you about triggering the Beeminder goal and then going back to sleep?

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Thanks for this suggestion @drtall. Unfortunately, I am 100% certain this alone would not be enough for me, as I already have a system set up that makes me get out of bed & go into another room, and although it works a fair bit of the time, I’ve also often gone back to bed. I need to implement something that makes me get showered, dressed & outside. Thank you though, this might be a good idea in tandem with the other things, to help me get up in time to get ready to go out, as it would be a much more elegant system than the one I have right now, and as I’d know I’d have to be out by a certain time for another goal set up with Beeminder, I wouldn’t have the option of going back to bed, otherwise it could be too easy to just snooze for another 10 mins (or 30!) and have to rush to get ready to get out.

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This is a reply for both @Phi & @hmowilliams (and anyone else who wants to contribute to this thread):

Hi, firstly, I am the original poster charityjf, I just started a new account because I wanted a different user name. Also, sorry for the delay replying, I had some other stuff on the last few days.

Anyway, thank-you both so much for your ideas! It’s great that I have a few options to try; this makes me feel really optimistic that I’ll find something that works and that would be seriously LIFE CHANGING! :blush:
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Re: the Runkeeper option:
I have done some research on this, because as you say, a benefit of that over IFTTT location tracking is that it can be used anywhere. BUT, it seems a problem with this is that I could input manual data, either into Runkeeper (see first link below) or into Beeminder (see second link below), and that makes it not at all weaselproof, which I need it to be.

https://forum.beeminder.com/t/runkeeper-disable-manual-logging-entries

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Re: the IFTTT location tracking option:

I would love a walkthrough for how to do this, yes please! That would be really kind of you.

Does anyone have any thoughts on whether this could be made to work if I go away also? Of course I could change the location I need to leave, but only upto a week beforehand, & I sometimes go away with less than a week’s planning. Would IFTTT allow me to pick two locations, and the rule is that I need to NOT be in EITHER of them by a certain time in the morning? That way I can set it up so I’m not allowed to be at home, OR at my sister’s house in London where I sometimes stay. If it could do that, this may then be a PERFECT solution. If I can’t enable that, I can still use this solution, and either have some ‘days off’ each week that I make sure I save for if I go away, or sort something out with support as you said earlier @phi.

Sorry this is such a long and involved thread, thank-you SO much if you read this far & are still giving your time to helping me sort this out. I really do appreciate it HUGELY.

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I have bugged support about less important things before :wink:
They provide the needed flexibility on top of the otherwise rigid corset that Beeminder imposes. And it is this combination that makes this tool work so well (for me that is).
So, yes, go write them every time a trip to your sister comes up out of the blue.

More on this:
For yourself and for support, define a bright green line at the beginning where you put down the spirit of the goal and what are unforeseen yet anticipated exceptions. In this case, the idea of the goal is to get you out of bed and out of the house. Not to impact visiting your sister even when it is on short notice. And obviously when you are sick as in “doctor told you to stay in bed” level sick. And so on. I assume that when you tell them about this before / when you weaselproof the goal you make it super easy for them to accept your reason for calling a derailment non legit or wanting a flat spot in the road etc.
I never weaselproofed myself so better double check with @shanaqui or @hmowilliams first though :slight_smile:

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Hi phi. Sorry, what exactly do you mean by ‘bright green line’? I’m guessing you mean it metaphorically, i.e. to set out to support from the start exactly what does & does not constitute derailment & what kind of proof I should provide? I’m still not familiar with the charts in Beeminder you see, so I’m not sure if you mean an actual green line on them or something?! :joy:

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Sorry for the delay!

And yes you figured it out correctly: The bright line is a metaphor I stole from support and from this blog post about barfing cats.
I’m not sure why I called it a bright green line, though :man_shrugging:

Your question made me think about how much I am down the Beeminder rabbit hole already and I love questions that make me think! Maybe next time I remember that before throwing Beeminder lingo at newbees :slight_smile:

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Here you go! I’m still pretty new to making tutorials, so definitely let me know if anything doesn’t make sense! :slight_smile:

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@hmowilliams super cool that you put this video together!

I skimmed the video looking for the screen where you might be setting aggday on the goal and didn’t see it, so I thought I would mention that you probably want the aggday set to max or nonzero or binary. That way, oscillating between in and out of the home area during a day can’t build up a safety buffer. Apologies if you did address this and I missed it!

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That’s a super important point @drtall, thank you!! I’ll edit that in as soon as I can :slight_smile:

Thanks again for your help on this everyone who has, especially @hmowilliams for that amazing walk-through video, that was so kind of you to make.

I feel I now understand how the IFTTT part of this could work; that I could set it to enter a data point when I go to any of several places where I ONLY go to walk in the morning, and won’t go to at any other time. That’s do-able, although I do like to mix up where I go each day so it doesn’t get boring, and some of those places (e.g. into the city centre) are places I would go at other times too.

@drtall, I have tried to figure out what it is you’re saying about the ‘aggday’ options, but I’m afraid I don’t understand. I found this support article which gave me some sort of idea:

https://help.beeminder.com/article/97-custom-goals

But, I still don’t understand what setting up that option would do? Would it mean I could go anywhere for my morning walk, and so long as I left either my house or my sister’s house once in the morning, that when I leave the house later in the day for other reasons that wouldn’t add extraneous points to my chart?

Also, it seems I would I have to pay for Beeminder Plus to be able to set that up, is that right? Honestly that would be quite a lot for me given I currently only plan to use Beeminder for this one goal. I don’t know if it’s possible to switch Applets in IFTTT on & off, but if so, might this be an alternative to paying for Beeminder Plus? I think I could remember to switch off an Applet if I’m going to a place I’d have set up for a morning walk at some other time of day. I’d probably just put a sticky note by my hand bag.

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BTW, I don’t know what’s happening with my username right now, I did ask support to combine my accounts, but for some reason they’ve added ‘tmp’ to the end of my user name right now. Not sure what’s happening there, but just so you know I’m still the OP!

[[working on cleaning this up! sorry for the hassle! --@dreev]]

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Right, the idea of using the aggday thing is to solve the problem you mentioned. You want to be able to leave your house 20 times during the day but only have it count once. The aggday setting tells Beeminder how to aggregate the data points for the day. Most goals don’t require you to think about this: you just add up all the data you enter. But for this goal, we want something that will only let you count a single “1” each day, which is why I suggested max or nonzero or binary. (The formulae are listed here: Documentation of aggregation methods would be nice - #4).

I should mention that typically Beeminding isn’t this complicated. I refer to that list of aggday functions about once every two years. So I hope all this doesn’t put a bad taste in your mouth!

Re: premium, I have a suspicion that these nice Beekeeper people might let you have a freebie on the premium plan for this one goal, considering you’re brand new and everybody’s already pitched in this much towards brainstorming how to configure this. But @dreev is probably the person to give an answer here.

Wait now I’m worried there’s still a corner case with how the custom deadline and aggday setting interact. What we want to actually accomplish is a setup where data points after the cutoff (but before midnight) don’t count whatsoever. For example, if 9 AM is the deadline, then house exits between 9:01 AM and midnight should all be ignored. Then, from midnight to 8:59 AM, we want to count using the aggday discussed above.

I’m worried that the custom deadline feature might not do what we want exactly. Would this logic have to be in the aggday itself? Definitely paging @dreev now haha. :smiley:

It does all sound quite difficult and complicated. Does anyone know if it’d work to just set it up how @hmowilliams said, with various places I can go to, and then if I’m going to one of those places at a different time, just switch off that Applet so it doesn’t send data to Beeminder?

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Yes, if you switch off the IFTTT Applet when you know you’re going to that location at a different time, it won’t send the data to Beeminder :slight_smile:

Thank-you, that’s good. Although, it has got me thinking if I might have found a weasel-loophole… could I not, whilst in bed, set up a new Applet to send data to Beeminder falsely… e.g. a rule to say when I’m in my home location, to send a data point to my chart? Or are you not able to change the Applets Beeminder gets its data from on an ad-hoc basis (i.e. only a week in advance, like all other changes, which would be fine.) Do you know @hmowilliams ?

I’m increasingly realising I sound like the laziest human alive here, and perhaps I am… but only when I’m half asleep. I don’t know whether it’s the fact that my body clock is so entrenched in being later (after working nights many years ago & never quite managing to get back to normal), or sometimes the fact that my mental health problems mean it can be really hard to get up and face the day (even though that is the only way to actually sort my life out!) But yeah, I just hope I don’t sound ridiculous here for having to weasel-proof myself this much. :grimacing:

Whilst I am SUPER grateful for all the help you guys are giving, I am wondering whether this particular goal would be better done in something like StickK. I do have somebody who can referee for me, I would just have rather not pulled them into it, but if it’s a better tool for this particular job, perhaps that’ll be necessary.

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If you’re motivated enough you can always find a way to lie to Beeminder. For me, at least, the setup is to make actually doing the goal the path of least resistance. e.g. maybe signing out of IFTTT on your phone is enough?

At least you’re in good company here. :slight_smile: The forums here consist exclusively of people like us haha.

I’m only vaguely familiar with StickK. The setup here would be that you have to call or prove to the referee that you’re actually awake and out of bed and then they tell StickK whether you were lying or not?

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