Extended Buffer Zone Warnings?

I’ve been out of the loop on beeminder updates for 6 months. Is there a feature that helps with pre-warning of approaching deadline?

Maybe I can explain via an example enhancement. The mobile app uses colors green, blue, orange and red. That’s great because it indicates when you’re approaching 2d and 1d pre-warning.

However, green is “3 or more days”. With my version of akrasia, I need a longer warning. A critical warning that I’m approaching a dangerous buffer zone. I might want to maintain a 3 day critical warning. Or a 4 day critical warning. I cannot do that so easily with everything being green.

Here’s another option. I create a $0 (beemium) pledge that is X days ahead of my “real” beeminder. That would become blue, yellow, and red upon approaching my buffer zone.

I want to (need to) maintain healthy buffer zones on my beeminders. 2 day warnings cause me stress, which I don’t think is productive for my type of anxiety based akrasia.

What are some ways I can deal with this? TIA!

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@coolhandlouis: I think that you can change when you will be reminded per goal on the https://www.beeminder.com/reminders/ page and change the “lead days”.

Examples:

lead day = 0 means you will be reminded the day a goal would derail
lead day = 4 means you will be reminded 4 days before the goal would derail.

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Thanks! I could definitely use that to help me. I’d still like to be able to do something a little more sophisticated as well, like link some goals I suppose.

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Can you explain a bit more what you mean by linking goals? E.g. does Metaminder help at all?

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Maybe! Or perhaps in a future version of linked goals.

I’d like to maintain a more healthy buffer on goals but they get lost in the sea of green. Let’s say I want to maintain a 3 day buffer. Then I’d like Beeminder to show me that goal like this with two indicators:

Countdown to Beemergency:

Day 7: :green_heart::green_square:
Day 6: :green_heart::green_square:
Day 5: :blue_heart::green_square:
Day 4: :orange_heart::green_square:
Day 3: :heart::blue_square:
Day 2: :heart::orange_square:
Day 1: :heart::red_square:

You could call the hearts the “buffermergency indicator”. The second column is your existing Beemergency indicator.

I would like to be able to see my buffermergencies along with my beemergencies.

That’s just a rough example. There might be better ways to achieve something similar. @cgamer1 had it real close with the lead days feature. The one thing that’s missing is the ability to see those custom designated “soft Beemergencies” (aka buffermergencies) along with my real beemergencies.

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@coolhandlouis: Based on an earlier topic that you created Beeminder + Org Mode = Heaven I think that you are familiar with code/the beeminder api. Ha please ignore my suggestion below if you are not.

If so you could GET/call the following key-value pairs from the API using something like Google Apps Script to put them in a spreadsheet like your example:

roadstatuscolor: provides values such as red, orange, green
safebuf: the number of days before you will derail (e.g. 7)

Once you have that data you can use conditional formatting to color the cells (e.g.if safebuf is less than 3 then color the cell red)

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Thanks! I haven’t coded anything in a very long time. But I appreciate your reply!

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If you use IFTTT, you can use a trigger of “x days of safety buffer” on a goal to have it do something else, like send you an email or notification, add it to your calendar, change a Hue lightbulb, or any other IFTTT-connected option. You can basically craft any type of reminding event that you want through that.

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(PS - because ifttt connects to google sheets, creating something like the graphic above might be pretty easy using some google sheets formulas and a spreadsheet that gets the safe days updated via the ifttt recipe)

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