Feature Request: Organizing Goals

I have 20 goals from different categories - lose weight & fitness, learning job related skills, building my online business, and other unrelated goals for different habits that I want to have and different behaviors that increase productivity and accountability. When I view them in Gallery view all these goals are mixed together and sorted by the time left until derailment. This can be very distracting sometimes in determining what goal to focus on next. There is no way to choose which goals to display and which ones to hide, and no way to manually sort goals. If I’m going to spend the next 8 hours working on my online business, I don’t need to see the 15 unrelated goals mixed with the 5 relevant goals, and then have to scan through all the goals each time to determine what goal to focus on next. I want to see just the 5 relevant goals that I want to focus on, and then manually sort their order in the order that I plan to do them.

I want to suggest the following 3 features to better organize goals:

  1. Add a tag to each goal with the name of its category - for example: lose weight & fitness, online business, etc. Then in the Gallery view, display the tags (each tag with a different color) with a check box next to each tag (or make a button of each tag, where clicking on it hides/shows the goals with that tag). So I can uncheck “lose weight” and the other tags and keep only “online business” checked, and then only goals with that tag will be displayed and all the others will be hidden.

  2. After selecting the category that I want to focus on, manually sort goals by dragging and dropping the goal boxes, so I can plan the order in which I want to do them (planning ahead instead of randomly picking which goal to do next).

  3. Have an option to hide the goals that have already been completed today and have a check mark next to them. When planning what goal to do next, I don’t need to see the 15 goals that I already completed today and have to scan through all the goals to find the ones that still need to be done. It would be great if there was a button to hide/show completed tasks, so that I can hide the 15 tasks that I completed and quickly see the 5 tasks that still have to be done.

I think these 3 features could really help to organize goals for better planning, a better sense of clarity and focus (what goal to focus on now), and a more productive use of Beeminder.
What do you think?

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If Beeminder wants people to have more than 3-7 free goals, we need to have more ways to organise these goals.
I’ve currently resorted to building pages in a Confluence space that embed the graph images of some goals, with links to the goal pages…

Thanks for articulating what I think is a pretty common desire.

I’m guessing that you’re pretty good at maintaining safety buffer; for those of us who skate the edge, knowing what may be about to derail is essential. In tagging and sorting and planning, we need not to lose the information about which commitments are about to explode.

Design challenge: how to also make it obvious if one of those hidden 15 is about to derail on you. (Even more crucial for folks who have staggered goal deadlines)


Someone may slap me for advertising a deprecated feature, but there’s a sort threshold field in advanced settings.

You can group your goals in the gallery by assigning all goals of the same category the same sort threshold, say, 10000, then 20000, and so on. I use this method to pin my most important 3 goals to the top of my gallery of 44 active goals.

Did I mention that it’s deprecated? (For all the reasons you suggest, there are better ways that we haven’t implemented yet.) In particular, neither the dashboard list view nor the beeta redesign use the sorting field.

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Design challenge: how to also make it obvious if one of those hidden 15 is about to derail on you. (Even more crucial for folks who have staggered goal deadlines)

Regarding the design challenge you mentioned, I would suggest the following -
On the Gallery page, there is empty white space on the left side. When showing tasks from a certain tag and hiding the rest, on the left side you can write in bold something like “You have goals in which you are about to derail”, and underneath show the goals that are blue, orange and red (maybe show them in lines like in the dashboard). And have a button to hide/show these goals.

So when I select to show only the goals that are tagged with Project X, beeminder would also show me all the blue, orange and red goals on the left side to remind me about them, and I can hide them if I want and see just the project related goals, or keep them on the left side.

Regarding the sort threshold feature you mentioned, I’m using it now to show my 2 most important goals on top, but I would like to be able to filter by tags and show just the relevant goals for each project, and being able to manually sort goals by dragging and dropping them in the order that I plan to do them today. I also think that having a button to hide/show the tasks with a check mark that I completed today will help to focus on the goals that still need to be done today.

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