Any HabitRPG fans who’ve tried the new Beeminder+HabitRPG integration? What do you think?
I look forward to an integration in the other direction, like had no goals with less than x safety buffer could be a habbit, or checked of all my dailies.
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The HabitRPG folks seem to be excited about that too so I think it will happen!
Just signed up for HabitRPG and have put a bunch of cleaning chores in as to-dos, to supersede my “Chores” graph on Beeminder (I was getting annoyed with manually counting up and writing in what I did each time; just hitting a checkbox is so much easier). I’m looking forward to integration with dailies, though, because then I can have the cleaning chores respawn at appropriate intervals and remind me what I have to do rather than having to keep track manually and pasting each chore into to-dos again every time I complete one. Still, it’s exciting! The ability (eventually) to have recurring tasks is why I waited for HabitRPG integration rather than tracking my cleaning chores with Trello, which doesn’t have any capacity for automatic recurrence. My eventual goal is to have it set up so I just know what two or three cleaning tasks I have to do every day, and my apartment is just perpetually clean, as opposed to my current method of letting it fall into absolute ruin and then having a giant cleaning binge. Not sure how much I’ll get into all the other gamification aspects of HabitRPG like gold and rewards and stuff; basically just seeing it as a task manager at this point. But I’m keeping an open mind. My little 8-bit dude is pretty cute.
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The ability (eventually) to have recurring tasks is why I waited for HabitRPG integration rather than tracking my cleaning chores with Trello, which doesn’t have any capacity for automatic recurrence.
Perhaps another way to approach this would be to give that specific chore its own Beeminder Goal, then you can set the rate to match its recurring need? Not meant to rain on your parade 
just want to help simplify 
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That would mean like 50 new Beeminder goals to keep track of! What a nightmare. No, I definitely just want something that serves me up a few tasks per day (e.g. wipe down the kitchen table, take out the recycling, unfuzz the couch…) and gives me a point for each of them.
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I use HabitRPG extensively, but To-Dos in a very strange way because it is sort of the clunkiest part of HabitRPG. I really can’t use this integration. But that’s okay! I’m glad there’s some integration. I may rethink how I use HabitRPG now.
Dailies integration would really absolutely be the best, though. It would be less about adding a penalty than leveraging Beeminder’s much better tracking/graphing capabilities.
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I Beemind lots of recurring tasks by grouping them into checklists and setting goals for each checklist. I give myself a 1 on completion. For some I might give myself a fractional value, e.g. 0.25 for one out of four completed. The rate is set to the bare minimum of how many times a week I want to clear the checklist.
It does add calculation complexity, and you can’t track individual checklist items with this alone. I use an iOS app called TracknShare that has nice flexible, recurring checklists. It kind of does tracking, but definitely not quite at the quantification level of Beeminder, and I can only access it on my iPhone.
In HabitRPG, some checklist items are single Dailies (mandatory recurring items), and some are Daily checklist items (action groups needing 100% completion for effect.) I use prefixes/suffixes to visually group related standalone items.
The weakness in either of these schemes–they’re only good for things should be completed on the same day. I have a Daily checklist for entering all my Beeminder data (which hasn’t been in effect since I’m still in the Inn in HabitRPG right now.) It works fine since I can just enter zeros or repeat the same value if there’s no change in data. Groups that would be completed in stages over a couple of days don’t work that well with either of these schemes–that’s more for HabitRPG’s To-Dos or Trello, neither of which can be scheduled to automatically recur as of yet.
I know this is pretty complicated! But maybe it will give you simpler, more sensible ideas.
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Previously I was using an Android app called Chore Checklist, which also has a web interface, and then marking down a point for each chore I completed on Beeminder, but it just felt too tedious. It seems like the magic bullet is something that has recurring tasks plus auto-integration with Beeminder, so I only have to click one thing to get it to register. That’s why I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’ll implement Dailies in HabitRPG soon. I’m keeping up with manually entering To-Dos as a stopgap, but I know myself well enough to realize that eventually I’ll get annoyed with doing that just the way I did with Chore Checklist, so I’m hoping the delay won’t be too long.
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I know what you mean. All my Beeminder goals are manual-input right now and it is a little crazy. I use SMS text snippets to track as close as possible to the action, instead of having to load up the site. I have meta-systems on top of meta-systems just to encourage me to enter data, and stuff still gets through.
How a HabitRPG Daily integration might workI’m trying to think about how a HabitRPG Daily integration would work. Here are the possibilities I can think of:- Total dailies/total dailies per tag (like To-Do integration)- Goal per daily
Total dailies/total dailies per tag would work like the To-Dos integration. It does create the incentive to artificially have a lot of dailies. Dailies have the potential to damage and eventually kill your character on the HabitRPG side.
Goal-per-daily would actually turn HabitRPG into a binary datapoint dashboard for Beeminder goals. Very appealing to me, especially because then I can track my dailies progress with Beeminder’s graph, which is tons better than the built-in HabitRPG graph. But maybe this is too weird and powerful and potentially confusing?
Anyway, aha
Even though I use HabitRPG strangely, I think I’ve found a way to get it to work well with Beeminder. I’ll update in a few days.
I just noticed that if you clear completed To-Dos (which I like to do every day because I like to be able to see what I did each day and then start fresh) before HabitRPG sends its data to Beeminder, those To-Dos won’t be counted in Beeminder, even though they’ve already been registered in HabitRPG. Just wanted to warn people!
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Great point! More on this in HabitRPG’s blog post about the integration…
If you’re beeminding remaining To-Dos then it doesn’t matter. If you’re beeminding more completed To-Dos then safest is to not ever delete any. But if you want to clear them out, make sure to hit the refresh button on Beeminder before and after doing so. That way Beeminder sees all the To-Dos before you delete them and sees the zero datapoint after they’re deleted as well. Beeminder treats that zero as a special case of like an odometer reset and keeps the count going. (Gory details from the FAQ.)
There’s now a Beeminder page on the HabitRPG wiki!
Wait, so I stopped deleting to-dos, as instructed, but now it looks like Beeminder is adding the total number on my to-do list every time I fetch data. Like, today I had a big cleaning spree, and got rid of 27 items on my to-do list. But when I fetched data earlier in the day to see what my graph would look like it registered 19 (which was correct at the time, I think), and then just now when I fetched data again, it added 35, for a total of 54 for the day, which… I don’t even understand how that happened, because I only did 27. So even if it added the full amount of my done list each time, where did the extra 8 come from? I’m so confused. I think I’m gonna manually edit the data so it just says 27 for the day and then not worry about it, I guess. But I’m concerned that maybe my early data was padded too, because now I can’t remember if I did as many chores as it’s saying I did…
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Well, I still don’t know what was up with the miscounted completed to-dos thing, but I guess I’m gonna start doing the refresh-delete-refresh trick mentioned above. I’ve gotten around the lack of dailies integration/recurring to-dos by just drawing up six weeks of chores (about 200 chores all together when you add in the ones that were already on my HabitRPG list) and entering them all in manually:
It took a while to paste them all in there, but now I’ll just be able to go down the list sequentially and then paste the whole thing back in again once the six weeks are up! It’s not ideal, but it’s the best system I’ve been able to come up with so far.
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@nepomuk yay, I’m glad you got it working! If you manage to reproduce behavior like this, let us know and we will hunt down the bug.
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It seems like unless I delete the entirety of my completed tasks before updating Beeminder, it’ll add the whole list whenever Beeminder fetches data. So today I completed 3 tasks, fetched data, 3 tasks were added to Beeminder. That was good. But then I completed 10 more tasks, fetched data, and 13 tasks were added to Beeminder! I’d really like to be able to avoid deleting my completed task list every single time I refresh Beeminder, 'cause it’s a lot of extra steps, but it seems like that’s the only way to prevent Beeminder adding the whole list of tasks every time I fetch new data.
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Oh! It always fetches the entire number of tasks, but that’s not cumulative - when it adds a datapoint of 3 and then a datapoint of 13, it just uses 13, not 3+13.
(Think of it like an odometer. And the 0 datapoint resets the odometer, so datapoints of 4 then 0 then 3 then 13 would be 4 + 3 13 = 17.)
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Thanks @alice (and @nepomuk for asking about this!). It had not occurred to me how confusing that must seem for people who are used to Do More goals where the datapoints are always cumulative! Keep letting us know what’s confusing.
Anyone into the idea of making a Beeminder Guild in HabitRPG? Since Beeminder only tracks to-dos, we could have challenges that are to-do only, rather than the mix of to-dos, dailies, and habits found in other guilds.
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