What do you mean by fully-featured habit tracker?
I don’t mean what apps are examples of that (the names won’t mean anything to me I’m afraid 
) – I mean what basic functionality do they provide?
The main thing I want in a fully featured habit tracker is to track all of my habits. That includes low priority ones with no sting. That also means I want to decouple stings (which require payment) from what I believe should be my “realistic ideal” deadlines/frequency of a goal I set (e.g. I want to do something daily. My goal would be to do it 6x/week. I want a sting if done less than 1x/week). I want this for high priority goals as well, because I don’t always want to pay for missing a goal (even a higher priority one).
That functionality would also affect how goals are displayed - they should be displayed based on the ideal frequency I set for myself with some way of marking / “pinning” goals that are going to sting soon so that they’re more prominent. Right now I can have a goal that I ideally want to do 6x / week, but only want to get stung if it goes below 1x / week. In the current implementation, that goal won’t be on top if I’ve done it 4 times this week even though I want to see it on top to remind me to do it almost daily.
There are some other more complex scheduling-type features that would be nice to have - for example, set up a goal that you want to do Mon/Wed/Fri with a sting if you don’t add a datapoint 2 days after that ideal goal…and other features like that. I don’t remember all of them, since I wrote that post a while ago. But the main things I would like are in the first two paragraphs above. On the other hand, paper and plain text have been working pretty well for me and have limited the phone/computer addiction type feelings and distraction that you get when using/updating an app.
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I am quite interested in this topic.
The main thing I want in a fully featured habit tracker is to track all of my habits.
This is also very important to me. Let’s say I want to just track (without paying) that I drink each night some water with lemon juice. I don’t wanna be paying for derailment, but want to still keep track of how many days I have done it. Using a graph with a superlow goal (like 1/month) seems like cheating, paying for Beemium seems very expensive.
I have some edge-skatey goals that stretch my capability or are the “you have to do this no matter what” goals. They will forever be edge-skatey and Beeminder reminders for me.
But especially on my goals that I can set up with autodata, magic happens and I get a little jolt of panic when they go in the yellow. (Usually, some automation broke. But recently on my writing goals… I wasn’t doing well, so genuinely the buffer was declining.) Those goals that naturally check off make me feel all kinds of good about my system. I recently had the idea that my shower speaker can automatically trigger a Tasker recipe to check off my shower goal for example and it’s been great. No forgetting anymore and it happens naturally (giving me a little dopamine boost for having come up with such an awesome automation too).
I do still use the dashboard as a general indicator for priorities in a day similar to what @dreev mentioned. Contrary to @dreev though, I do set the times to the latest I can healthily complete a goal (not all 5pm). Otherwise on bad days, I will end up writing things at 23:55 in the night etc, which isn’t helpful for anyone and just works against my actual goals. So finishing those around 20:00 is a much healthier alternative.
I think for a lot of goals this “use other things than beeminder” is a very good approach and more sustainable in the classic habit building process. If the beeminder ping is the habit trigger, that habit will always cease to exist if the beeminder ping goes away. If there’s another more natural trigger, the habit will form around that trigger, sustaining the habit beyond the (sometimes stressful) Beeminder ping.
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What are some other things that trigger a habit?
And how does the automation work?
That’s a very good insight, actually.
But, I still don’t really know how to answer the question of "how to have a log record of all the habits that I have done in just one place but without having to pay for them all in case they derail (as I do not want to be as strict with some goals as the ones I beemind). Automation is a good idea, but you cannot automate everything (in a cheap way, I mean).
Apologizes for the extravaganza of replying to myself, but I think that my perspective has changed on this.
Let’s start by stating the basics (for me):
- Habit tracking matters. It is a small reward for completing the habit, it gives you data that can be used to analyze patterns, be able to create more realistic goals in the future, and you might be able to brag about your progress.
- Easy, clustered tracking is essential. Recording your habit has to be easy, if you want to keep the habit (so, autodata is good when possible). Another important point is to have only one place where you can track all your habits. Where are the habits that I am tracking? Here. This is about being organized. Where are my spoons? In the kitchen. Same type of question.
So, you want to be able to track the habits you wanna track in a simple place, in a simple way.
But then, some problems arise. You might not want to track your habits with the same intensity as others (therefore, you might not want to put money there). And you might have your reasons: maybe you are just testing or maybe you wanna track not-as-important habits. That’s fine.
Here are some alternatives:
- If you are just testing a habit, start it with a long-starting buffer, something like 30 days. This is enough for testing and to see whether the initial excitement wears off after the first 10 days. You can even create something like “beeminder.com/user/xxxgoalTRIAL” name. If it comes successful, you can either create a new goal minus the trial part or just change the name and use the data that you already have.
- If you want to track a habit that won’t last for long (<10 days) maybe you can use something like TaskRatchet.
- If you want to track something that you know you will be capable of doing BUT you don’t want to put money on the line, create a goal with a suuuuperlow rate. I thought this felt like cheating but you got to ask why. If missing the goal has big consequences, it is probably a good idea to pledge money on it. If missing the goal has low consequences, then, why should you feel bad for not pledging money? - in the end, you just want to track it.
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I think the ultimate answer to this is to use a separate and more robust, lower friction, habit tracker that integrates with Beeminder. Extra points if that habit tracker also helps you with your to-do lists. Or in other words, a robust to do system that includes habit tracking, and integration with Beeminder.
Then everything that you need TO DO, including your high priority beeminder tasks, and your lower priority non-beeminder habits, all of those would be managed under one centralized application. Beeminder then just becomes a back-end for commitment contracts.
What habit tracker will do this? I don’t have an answer to that. I think that emacs and org-mode might have that capability. There are two independently created integrations for org-mode that I know of. And those integrations could certainly be expanded as necessary. (I have it on my plate to eventually dive into these integrations.) But emacs is certainly not for everyone, not for a typical user.
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I am quite happy with my (last) own answer/solution but I am still open to experiment with new habit trackers. If you came to know any for a typical user tell me 