Deadlines can't be changed for Sleepasandroid, Rescuetime nor Draft

It seems that I am unable to change the deadlines for some of the “data automatically added” such as sleepasandroid, rescuetime and Draft but I am able to change deadlines for from the start page but can for IFTTT, Twitter or manual entry. Not sure about the others on the start goal screen as not got any goals using them at the moment

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Hi there! Thanks so much for sharing that this seemed weird to you – it really helps to know when things are tripping folks up, so we can look into making them clearer in future. In this case, if I understand what you’re describing correctly it doesn’t sound like there’s a bug at issue here.

So, there are some integrations where you cannot change the deadline time, and that’s the intended behaviour on our side. The reason is that changing your deadline messes with the date that your graph thinks it is – e.g. if you change your deadline to 10pm, then Beeminder thinks it’s the next day after 10pm (instead of after midnight) on that date. If you change your deadline to 2am, the date doesn’t change until 2am. Obviously our integration partners don’t do the same thing, so you’d end up with data entered with the “wrong” date (from our point of view). With some, like IFTTT, the date problem doesn’t occur because of the way we handle those datapoints, so you can change your deadlines at will.

Does that explain what you’re seeing? Or is there something inconsistent happening?

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Yes that makes sense, just annoyance as I had been hoping to potentially use draft as a morning alarm almost but found way around that so thats OK.

Do you mind sharing your workaround?

Moved away from morning alarm at the moment but if you are thinking about using Draft or RescueTime usage as morning alarm the best way I found was using a chrome extension called LeechBlock.
I had dedicated 0700-0725 as writing time (usage of time boxing, sticking to the schedule),
I made it so that I had to write 750 words each day in Draft or Cowriters (which rebranded to writelier, is now shutting down)
I would use LeechBlock to block the site for the whole day apart from between 0700-0725 time I had down for writing, If I felt weaselly I would both set it so I couldnt edit the leechblock block and also unable to access extensions to remove it.

UI suggestion: you could add a hover text to the deadline field in those cases, something like “Changing the deadline isn’t possible for this type of integration” (similar to the hover texts for enabling SMS/… notifications). I was pretty confused until I found this post, so other users may be as well.

And a feature request: would it be possible to just discard data points that arrive after the deadline for those integrations? I use Toggl to track time for certain projects but this has lead to staying up late to stay on track, which isn’t the incentive structure I want. If Beeminder simply didn’t count any time logged after the deadline, that would be almost as great for me as the deadline behavior for manually entered goals.

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Hi @ejenner , welcome to the forum.

Thanks for the input. A simple hover text or similar seems easy enough and should provide adequate value. There is at least one other place in the webapp UI with a similar description (goal / settings / data for an autodata goal: “At the moment we don’t have a way for you to swap data sources here yourself for autodata goals. But won’t it be cool when we do have a handy way to do that?”)

Your suggestion with ignoring data after deadlines is how I originally thought (or hoped) they would work too.
The suggestion seems to imply setting a before-end-of-calendar day deadline, say 5pm. In that case it may be clear, anything between 5pm and midnight would be ignored. At midnight the day resets and the datapoints can be accepted again.
In my case, I had hoped the datapoint would still be tracked and listed in the list of datapoints but not counted toward the graph / goal value if it had not arrived by the deadline.
More recently though I have switched my deadlines back to basically midnight because I want data created on a given day to be listed with that as its daystamp. As is, say with a deadline of 11am, a datapoint on a Wednesday at 11:10am will be recorded as a datapoint for Thursday.

However, one can also set the deadline to make “a late night”. If the deadline then were set to say 2am which is meant to mean not just 2 hours each day but rather anytime during the day + 2 hours into the next day, how could the system/Beeminder know when to count the datapoint for ‘today’ or ‘yesterday’?

Good point, my suggestion doesn’t extend to deadlines after midnight. I was just thinking about how to address my use case without needing to translate between Beeminder dates and dates on other sites. But implementing something like this would probably make the interface more confusing because deadlines would behave differently than they do for other goals and deadlines after midnight still wouldn’t be possible.