since I am new to this and I would like to put a quite hefty fee for not reaching a specific goal, I really need your help, as some things about Beeminder aren’t really that intuitive.
I want a goal that needs to be cleared by the 20th of december. No daily, weekly or monthly tasks to complete, the only check has to be, if I have cleared a specific task by the 20th of dec.
I did set up the goal, gave 2021-12-20 as goal date with “1 todos” (0.53 goal total).
But above the graph, it tells me “+1 due in 1d 12h 11m 30s”. Wait… I did set the goal date as 12-20, not tomorrow! Could you explain to me what is going on? It says “or pay $0”, but this is pretty confusing to me.
Hi Marvin! I think I might’ve replied to you by email as well, if I’m remembering correctly. Beeminder is usually all about doing things consistently over time – more like “brushing my teeth every day” and “working for an hour a day on my dissertation” than “finish this one task by [date]”. The expectation is that you’ll make incremental progress every day… and then we automatically use integers until you use a non-integer datapoint, so as soon as any amount is due, +1 is due!
You can set goals up with end dates so that they automatically end on a certain date, but the goal would slope up toward that. I guess you could create a goal with a rate of 1/year, start with 30 days flat spot, and then use the road.beeminder.com tool to tweak things so it’s totally flat until the date you want to have completed the task… but of course that’s not really the sort of thing Beeminder is meant for. We also can’t check whether a specific Todoist task is done, though if you put it in its own project and beeminded that project, I guess that’d work.
There is a service that would work pretty much the way you want, though, and that’s Taskratchet. It can’t tell if a task on Todoist has been done, so you’d have to do the check-off manually… but it’s designed for single tasks. If you have iOS, GTBee is a Beeminder-linked app that can also do single-time tasks – we’re not actively developing for it, but at present it still works (as far as I know) and might also be useful.
We might be able to help you more if you were to give us some insight into the nature of your goal.
It wouldn’t be advised, for example, to just have a single goal to lose 40 lbs by December or pay some big amount. You could have that goal, but it would be highly encouraged to have other daily or weekly goals as well.
By default, we don’t let you set a hefty fee straight away. Rather, you climb what we call the ‘pledge schedule’ each time that you don’t stay on track to achieving your goal.
That’s why it said “or pay $0”, because the first time is free. After that it’s $5, $10, $30, $90, $270, $810, or until you reach whatever amount you set as the ‘pledge cap’ when you created the goal
Beeminder is usually all about doing things consistently over time – more like “brushing my teeth every day” and “working for an hour a day on my dissertation” than “finish this one task by [date]”. The expectation is that you’ll make incremental progress every day… and then we automatically use integers until you use a non-integer datapoint, so as soon as any amount is due, +1 is due!