I also have this body fat goal https://www.beeminder.com/apolyton/goals/bodyfat It gets autodata from Fitbit with a single decimal. The calculations contain up to 3 decimals though. This means I have to mentally convert the “due by tomorrow” -0.011 number into -0.02
+1 I’ve been meaning to suggest the following as well! For even more flexibility allow us to set the minimal meaningful unit (MMU). In your case it would be 0.01, for binary goals 1, for tagtime goals 0.75, etc.
Target, bare min and amounts due by day would be rounded up to the closest multiple of the MMU.
re-quote for emphasis of ! this has a lot of really cool and useful applications, i think - e.g. beemind running 60min/wk, with no runs shorter than 20min. sure, you could do it as a binary “runs longer than 20min” with a rate of 3/wk, but that’s not as qs as tracking minutes!
So if you tried to enter 0.5 on an integer goal, or 10 minutes on a running goal with MMU=20min, would Beeminder just give an error and not accept the datapoint? Or it accepts it but it treats it as 0 until there’s enough to reach the Minimum Meaningful Unit?
I like the idea. Just might be some tricky design decisions to make.
I think that would be acceptable. Today, whenever I enter a non-integer for one of these goals it means I’m cheating (usually to move a weekdays-only goal to Monday or a weekends-only goal to Saturday).
@dreev Any chance of simply exposing the existing setting for the number of decimals (e.g. whatever sets that a step goal via Garmin uses integers and a non-automated goal has 2 decimals)?
To be clear, do you mean the mental gymnastics of remember that your scale has only one decimal place so a hard cap of 87.37 is really a hard cap of 87.3?
You said “completely wrong information” so I’m worried the problem is worse than that.
That said, the goals page information isn’t very helpful either. Lose 0.028kg from which number? I need to recall what I weighted yesterday (or further back in time if i don’t weigh every day). I’d rather see that my goal for today is to weigh 87.3
(Obviously this issue is specific to these types of goals. For other goals like word count or tasks or hour-based ones, the Delta number is the right information to show)
Honestly if we couldn’t have a setting I’d be happier with a default of no decimals anywhere. You can track time goals in seconds and everything else in whatever unit is similarly fundamental to the thing you’re doing. Then Beeminder would stop telling me I need to lotion my hands 0.029 times tonight.