Earning carrots in Beeminder: Using both positive and negative data points in a single goal?

Has anyone tried using both positive and negative data points in the same goal?

For instance, I was thinking of creating a Beeminder goal where I get a +1 for each pomodoro I do, and a -4 for each cat video I watch on YouTube. The idea is to earn a carrot (permission to watch a cat video) for each four pomodoros. I think this could be set up with a “do more” goal with a rate of zero. As you do pomodoros, you get above the flat line; as you watch cat videos, you eat up your pomodoro data points. To not derail, you need to do more pomodoros than you watch cat videos, with a ratio of 4:1.

Has anyone tried something along those lines?

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Yep, I have a goal like this! I get a point every time I go to a non-fancy grocery store and subtract a point every time I go to an expensive grocery store. It’s actually helped a lot. Before I used to get everything, even staples, at the froofroo store up the hill, every time I needed to pick up a single specialty item. Mainly I was lazy, but also I got way too excited about shopping at the fancy places, and would take any excuse to go there and browse. Now I go to the cheaper store nearby first, get everything I can find on my shopping list, and then just go to the fancy store for the one or two things I couldn’t find at the first place. One positive plus one negative means I break even! Right now I’ve got a flat road, so that even one more trip to the cheap place gets me into the green, but at some point I’ll probably dial the difficulty up a bit, so that I have to go to the cheap places significantly more often than the fancy places just to stay on the road.

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Our tocks script subtracts two points every time that you declare yourself to have been distracted during a tock. Tocks are like pomodoros, periods of task focus, so giving yourself a ‘smack’ is equivalent to needing to do two more tocks.

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I use such a graph in order to measure being late/coming in time. It even has a negative slope so that I need to be in time more often that otherwise…
Some backlogs are also more manageable if I enter +x, -y each time I add something to the pile / process something from the pile - rather than this being an odometer/whittle down goal.

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