I’d like Beeminder to make me submit data to weight goals (weigh in) regardless of how close to derailing I am.
Pessimistic presumptive might kind of work, but it isn’t available on (at least my) Fitbit scales “autodata” weight goal. It also wouldn’t work too well if your weight road was quite a bit higher than your current actual weight (which is how I like to keep a weight goal).
I’d like a solution to this loop:
Set lower weight goal and dial road down accordingly
Weigh in regularly on wifi-connected scales to get to goal weight
Reach goal, road is now flat
Stop weighing in for many months (no penalty)
Put on weight
Goto (1)
I feel that a solution to this could work for other kinds of goal too, so maybe it could be a universal option.
I remember reading on Google+ way back that a solution might be to create meta-goals to beemind data entry of other goals. Is this possible?
This sounds like a great job for some kind of intermediate tool that would simply track and report “time since last datapoint” for various sources. Then you could set up a Lose-Weight type goal (or stay-under-threshold advanced goal) corresponding to delay, to keep reporting lapses under a certain threshold. I could see this even being useful for enforcing tracking of things you might not be Beeminding.
Maybe Zapier already has something like this?
Edited to add:
You can accomplish basically the same thing with the Fitbit and Gmail IFTTT integrations and a Do More goal if you have a Gmail address for your Beeminder account.
On Beeminder:
Create a new Do More goal . Set rate based on how many times you want to weigh in: 7 times per week if you want to weigh yourself every day.
On IFTTT:
Create a new recipe and pick the Fitbit channel for the ‘this’ step.
Select the Fitbit trigger “New Weight Logged”.
For ‘that’, pick the ‘That’
Use the Gmail action “Send an email”. Address it to bot@beeminder.com with [your username]/[goal-slug] as in the subject, where [goal-slug] is the last part of the URL for your newly created Do More goal.
Put ^ 1 in the body. You can also follow it with a comment if you’d like.
This will send a +1 datapoint to your Do More goal. You can of course game this by weighing yourself many times on the same day, so don’t do that.
Let me know if this works. I don’t actually use Fitbit, so I don’t know how how well the IFTTT or Beeminder integrations actually function.
Thanks for the trick with IFTTT; this is exactly what I missed so far. Also shout-out to the Beeminder folks for auto-whitelisting new email-address that the bot receives and sending an “did you intend this” email to the original one. Really cool feature!
Henrik
Weight goals are special, in that the roadwidth tries to accommodate the variance in your weigh-ins, and guarantees to expand the roadwidth if your weigh-in is in the good lane one day and over the road the next day. All that works better (or only) with daily weigh-ins. ( see blog/roadwidth )
And of course, weight is an outcome of eating better and exercising more. Obvious, but took me a long time to realise, helped by this community. So my own weight graph is very shallowly sloped, but my goals for things that will influence my weight are more aggressive. (Here’s Bethany’s take: blog/weight )
Hackery
I use the ifttt trick for my gym goal, by sending an email to the bot after a foursquare checkin.
It’s a brilliant idea to use it for tracking data-entry frequency.
Beeminder also supports callbacks, which (eventually) will feature as inbound triggers on the zapier and ifttt channels.
But if you’re techie, you can hack something together using the API that gets notified when you add a datapoint to a goal. You can specify the URL on the Terrifyingly Advanced settings tab.
When I check into the gym, for instance, that automagically updates my stretching & sweating goals.