Complice sends data to Beeminder only once - when you finish your day. Thus, if you have a beemergency you have to either derail or finish all your stuff before that. If you do enough to prevent derailing but then do some more productive stuff - you’ll get derailed!
I’m not sure this can be called a bug - both Beeminder and Complice work exactly as promised, the situation is caused by their interaction. There’s even a cautionary text when you add an integration, with the most important bit highlighted for readers as studious as me:)
Needless to say, I don’t remember reading that bit at all.
Now, this would not be a problem if all your goals had their derails at the time you should’ve already ended your day anyway.
However, that would shift all those precious last minutes with their miraculous productivity to the time when you’re not doing anything!
I didn’t have this problem with my previous workflow of “moving Trello cards manually”. I’ve been using Complice instead for less than a week and I already like it a lot more but I can clearly foresee the same problem happening again.
I think this is not my last beemergency and I don’t want to move all my derail times to my downtime. I also think this is not pretty unique so maybe someone faced the same problem and has a workaround?
There’s a “data” tab on goal’s page and I could theoretically update the value of the day before beemergency - but 1) I’m not sure it won’t break stuff 2) I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know if I can game the system this way, so that’s not a good optoin.
I had that problem too! My workaround, essentially, is to only use the “Beemind Arbitrary Things” integration! Those send a datapoint as soon as the relevant intention is checked off. It doesn’t even feel like a “workaround” anymore because I’ve grown to love the power of this integration for itself.
I have twelve of these arbitrary integrations and I really love them. Here are my first five:
The fourth one on that list gives me a point for every completed intention in that goal, which should be just the same as the thing you were trying to do. The others help me track individual activities more or less granularly than at the goal-level. I’ve barely scratched the surface of how much these can do, but I’m happy to explain any of them if you want to know more!
Huh, yeah. (Complice creator here). I’m actually reflecting that it might make sense to remove the “# of completed outcomes by goal” one because it’s basically already taken care of by the arbitraries. I recently did this with starred & pomo items, but this would be different because the star/pomo ones already behaved identically to the arb ones, whereas in this case (as you point out!) the logic is different.
Obviously outcomes % would still have to be sent when the outcomes as a whole are submitted.
I think I also want to have a little button that will auto-generate common arbitraries for people, or that makes little sentences out of them:
I want to track all of the [completed tasks, pomos, numbers, sums] that I do towards tasks from [any goal, goal 1, etc] that match the text [_____].
That might be more intuitive to set up simple ones, but may make more complex ones more confusing.
Ahhhh except the confusing issue with using the arbitraries is that if you don’t get a chance to add an item before you get to outcomes mode, then it doesn’t get counted at all. So someone for whom that happens often might strongly prefer the outcomes counter.
Ultimately I want to make that more coherent, which should be more possible since the backend refactoring I did in January, and goes well with some recent code I’ve been working on too.
Yeah, presence of that option stopped me from looking into arbitraries - which are much more powerful and awesome. Even if you remove “# of outcomes”, maybe consider moving arbitraries higher? Do you have heatmap data?
I’ve taken a look at that page again: weekly/monthly reviews could be collapsed into one option with weekly/monthly dropdown (not sure if that’s needed, but anyway) and “show this Beeminder widget” radiobutton does not seem to work.
Or should I have revived this topic? Forum says it’s not a good idea
It took a long time, but I finally completed this upgrade! (As I mentioned, it required completing another refactor, which took the better part of several months)
So there’s now a new intentions option in the arbitrary section, and the intentions/outcomes counts have been collapsed into the arbitrary section.
To avoid data duplication, any arbitrary integrations that were ported from Counts won’t start being used by the backend until April 12th, at which point the Counts will stop being used.
