One of the issues I’m trying to find a solve for is with time tracking. I don’t love Toggl, but it’s fine. I’ve been using it with Zapier to push my timer results to Beeminder, but I’ve got two weeks left in the month, and I’ve almost used up all my zaps (and I was out of town for work last week and didn’t time anything!!)
I’ve resorted to using a different timer on my iPhone, then putting # into Toggle at the end of the day – which kind of is pointless, as I might as well just manually input them into Beeminder, losing the whole autodata advantage. I’ve considered collapsing some of my goals into one, but if I have a generic “clean the house” goal, I’ll end up tidying my makeup for 15 minutes every day instead of cleaning toilets, or washing dishes
I really don’t want to go premium on Zapier–it’s just too much $. I’ve looked at some of the scripts, but being on PC, I’m clueless as to how I would actually implement them. I have an Android tablet with a battery issue, but if using it instead of the phone helps, I’d find a way to make it work.
well, if you’re into beeminder, you may be into tagtime as well - which is available as an android app (and as a more complicated but more feature-full script).
it’s definitely a different approach to time-tracking than pretty much every other tracker out there, but it’s pretty frictionless (imo, though i don’t use the app version), free, and integrates well with beeminder possibly not suitable/desired for every single time-tracked goal you’re working with, but may work for some of them!
there’s also the timer data entry option in the bmndr android app, which you could use instead of the iphone timer. avoids the need to double-process the entries! this is probably much simpler than tagtime, now that i think about it…
Tag time wouldn’t work for most of my goals, but I wouldn’t mind looking at it for another reason–I didn’t realize there was an app.
I also didn’t realize the android beeminder app has different functionality than the iOS one. That may be exactly what I’m looking for. I’ll take a look!
OK – interesting. It looks like the timer data entry measures time in hours instead of minutes, but my goals are set in minutes… is there an easy way to make that adjustment, or should I just restart the goals?
What to do:
Go to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Terrifyingly advanced’
Right at the very bottom there is this option:
'Multiply all datapoints and all segments of the road by this amount:'
enter: 0.01666666
and hit ‘scale it’
This should then transform all your datapoints to be hours.
(You should also check your road value is still correct after scaling, it might need adjusting.)
Mathematical Reasoning:
Since your goal is currently in minutes, and 1 minute is 1/60 of an hour, if you scale by 1/60 you should get values in hours.Cannot put 1/60 in so you need to convert to decimal.
Wait! I would suggest not doing that just yet!
If you’re going to do that, keep screenshots of all your data pages first. I’ve had some problems with the scaling (as well as with the CSV export, which is why I recommended screenshots) and you don’t want to lose that data permanently if you encounter any and haven’t saved your original info somewhere.
We can vouch for the rescaling feature being reliable, at least to the extent that we’ll personally help roll it back if it does anything bad! In theory you can always undo a rescaling by x by doing another rescaling by 1/x. We’ll be very grateful to see a counterexample so we can debug it!
possibly not suitable/desired for every single time-tracked goal you’re working with, but may work for some of them!