Hey,
So a problem I sometimes have with Do More goals is the temptation to binge when I’m trying to create a habit: working on various talks I’m giving close every day, study Russian almost every day, meditate every day etc.
Now, an obvious solution is “just have more willpower” but, hey, the whole point is to create incentives that help us make the right decisions, right?
I guess the first beeminder-y way of dealing with this is having a second goal per Do More I’m trying to make a habit, that gets ticked by one if the task was done that day. That seems messy, though.
Really what I want is a situation where I have to be above one line and below another at all times but enter only one data point.
Even in the messier case of having multiple goals fed by the same data, it’d be cleaner if it was literally the same data, rather than a copy of it.
That might be the easiest solution, though; you can set up an IFTTT recipe to add one to the frequency goal every time there’s an entry on the study goal. Of course, that means that multiple meditations in a single day might count, which might be fine for some goals and not for others.
If you’re a plan bee subscriber, you can use a custom aggregation method to count the presence of an entry that day rather than the size of it.
Right now, the above one line and below another idea also requires a second goal, to force you to do less of the thing. Again, you can use IFTTT to copy the original datapoint so that it doesn’t add data-entry overhead.
I have ran into the same situation as you and Philip, but I prefer the way “Do More” goals work in Beeminder over “Do Less” goals, so I usually set up a “habit” goal and a “habit days” goal. That way both are “do more”. It can be completely automatic if you get a premium plan that supports custom goals, and then setup IFTTT.
Yeah, I considered a Do More and a Do Less combo, but I think doing the “goal amount” and “goal-as-habit” pair gets better at the semantics of what I want even though visually it’s not as obvious. I could always do an IFTTT pairing, though, that hadn’t occurred to me.