Hi, I’ve been using beeminder to try and beemind myself to sleep earlier. It… Hasn’t really worked. I find myself just straight up lying about what time I go to bed (so the deadline is 12.15 AM, and I hit submit before then, but I go to bed late anyways) so I’m thinking about setting up a goal where I have to wake up early (like maybe at 7-8 AM) and hit submit in the morning (maybe the deadline will be at 8 AM) so I don’t get charged. I know this could backfire if my phone’s alarm doesn’t go off for whatever reason or if I’m sick, but honestly I can’t think of any other solution to this. What do you guys think? Is this a good idea?
I also have a beeminder goal for “bedtime by a specified time” (22:30 in my case) and don’t have this problem. Maybe what helps somewhat is that the bedtime goal time is decoupled from my beeminder deadline to submit data? I don’t actually even remember what the latter is for me… I have it set to 23:00 for some of my goals and midnight for others, but it’s irrelevant really. The way I operationalise the bedtime goal is that I have a daily recurring Todoist task “Bed by 22:30”, which I only mark done once I’ve actually gone to bed (and then only if that happened by 22:30, obviously!). And my beeminder goal is completion of Todoist tasks in the Bedtime category, at a rate of 0.8 per day (enforcing my bedtime most but not all of the time).
You don’t have to use a Todoist task, obviously — that just works well for me personally since most of my tasks live in Todoist and I have a strong habit of ticking things off in there. Regardless, I suspect the key is to only be submitting data once you’ve actually gone to bed, so that you’re not tempted into lying by reasoning “Well, I’m just about to go to bed, so I’ll claim success” and then not actually doing so. This could be difficult if you have any commendable sort of policy or habit like “no phone use in bed” though.
Submitting the data the following day could be fine too, but I don’t see why you need to change it to a wake-up goal in order to accomplish that. You could just couch the datapoints as “Did I go to bed before 12:15am last night?” and then you can submit last night’s datapoint any time between when you wake up and whatever your beeminder deadline for the goal is that night.
Of course if you want to have a wake-up goal instead of or in addition to a bedtime goal, that’s a different matter. But personally I’d avoid conflating the two.