feature idea: beeminder app detects your location, updates goals when you are near certain locations.
use case ideas:
- go to the gym more
- go to fast food less
- go out of the house more
- go to the supermarket more
- visit aging relative more
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Great use cases!
Here are ways to do this currently:
- If you use Foursquare/Swarm you can do this via our Zapier integration. zapminder.com
- If you use Tasker on Android you can set this up with our Tasker integration.
- IFTTT for Android appears to be able to do this; not sure about iOS. [1]
- UPDATE: @chriswax reports that this works on iOS too
- Abandon us for GymPact which does this feature nicely for the case of going to the gym. [2]
[1] Weâre going to be an official IFTTT channel soon; and you can already make IFTTT recipes that send data to Beeminder by using the Gmail or SMS channel to send data to the bot.
[2] Of course GymPact doesnât have a yellow brick road or exponential pledge schedule or many of the other reasons Beeminder gets the underlying psychology / behavioral economics right. Not to mention GymPact has no API or friendly data export (not sure about that one â googleâs not finding much though). GymPact fans should by all means jump to their defense!
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GymPact sucks so much you wonât believe it. First it constantly bugs you, even when you have completed your goal for that day, second the app is horribly slow, third it is super limited in what it lets you change, finally no friendly support staff.
It does get one thing right - you sign up for doing X exercises per week, not per seven days period like beeminder does. It means you wonât have an emergency day where you have to do 0.29 runs that day and it is easy to know when a you have to complete your exercises by - it is always sunday night.
That said those things likely only makes sense because GymPact is so limited - it possibly does make sense to do e.g read 32 kindle locations to reach your goal of reading 700 a week even though that is a kinda odd number.
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Iâm using the iOS location with IFTTT and gmail. If I enter the gym area then IFTTT sends an email via gmail to the beeminder bot.
The accuracy of location is not so high, but in my case it works. Give it a tryâŚâŚ
Chris
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Oh my, I feel like even clicking âlikeâ on this is launching a boulder out of a house made of paper-thin glass. (:
No no, GymPact is all wrong! Commence rock-hurling! Beeminderâs yellow brick road with optional initial flat week is the best of all worlds. More in our Chunky Time post. In short, you can have that property (get all the exercising done by Sunday) if you start with a flat week. And for the truly akratic, itâs a wonderful feature that Beeminder makes you be on track every single day.
One thing we should do to make it not seem like itâs being all pedantic (or something) is know when only integer datapoints make sense. So if you technically needed 0.29 runs it would just tell you âyou need 1 run by midnightâ.
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If the gym/dance school/aging relative/restaurant has Wi-Fi you can have tasker set up
When in range of WiFi blah blah
Then update Beeminder etc.
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I currently have a goal that requires me to spend a total of one hour per week around the gym,
and another goal that allows me to go to bed after midnight no more than twice per week when Iâm at home.
This is based on data from the Moves app and Fitbit, and wired together with Zenobase, see Zeeminding.
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sweet!
Iâve been using Pact for a year (alongside Beeminder of course!) to see how it felt. The Sunday deadlines are my least favourite feature of Pact.
Sanity dictates that my pact be pretty achievable, whatever the week holds, so thereâs an excellent chance that Iâve ticked all the required activity boxes by the time Sunday comes around. Before Pact, I used to go swimming at the gym on Sunday afternoons. Now, Sundays are super demotivational, because thereâs the nagging incentive that by putting off my gym-going until Monday, itâll count toward my next weekâs pact. Even though, most weeks, I end up going neither Sunday nor Monday. Thatâs a net loss from an exercise/health perspective.
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Right, didnât think about that. You have convinced me, although for some goals I would still not want the option of getting too much ahead (these goals tend to be in the form of âEvery day in $MONTH I will do $ACTIVITYâ just to see how that feels) but that doesnât seem to apply sensibly to working out, which is pacts entire reason for existing.
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Weâve got you covered! The Retroratchet! link just below your graph is for exactly that reason. By default it removes all but 2 âsafe daysâ, putting you right on the road edge. Premium plan subscribers have more options for how much safety buffer is trimmed, and Plan Bee contains my favourite feature: autoratchet, which lets me configure an upper-bound on the safety buffer for a particular goal.
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