I have a work deadline every week at midnight Friday evening.
I should Ideally complete this before I log off at 5pm, but as long as I submit before midnight that’s all that matters.
I’m struggling to come up with a good way to track this in Beeminder. I’m thinking minutes/hrs before/ after Friday @midnight deadline?
I know you’re supposed to put 1/7 for 1x week goals, but then I get confused about how this would work if using minutes. I couldn’t really see the progress I want to track, and I feel like I’d have to do some weird delay buffer to not derail throughout the week and then that wouldn’t force the deadline I want?
I’d like to keep track of progress and hopefully see the submission time get earlier and earlier, track any misses which would be derailments. Was thinking about an IFTTT button that would submit the data point.
Hmm, is there any reason why just adding +1 for “I did it” sometime before midnight on Friday wouldn’t work? Maybe I’m not understanding the setup you want?
If you just want to make sure you finish it on time, then indeed just +1 with a rate of 1/week will do it.
If what you actually want is to encourage yourself to do it early, then it’s a bit trickier, just like, psychologically. I’ve indeed made goals that are like “go to bed on average X minutes before midnight”, but you’re kinda right that this might work pretty awkwardly for a 1/week task, unless you have a lot of buffer. But then if you have a lot of buffer, you won’t necessarily realize how early you need to finish this friday in order for your buffer to carry to next friday.
Does anything actually stop you from doing the task on Thursday if you didn’t leave yourself enough buffer? If not, you may be willing to accept this tradeoff.
Nothing also stops you from making the goal +1 for finishing by 5pm, and just say too bad, you derail if you finish it at 6 pm.
Another option would be to think of other tasks you want to finish “early” on other days of the week, and combine them all into the same goal. This would make managing the buffer a bit easier, but you obviously may not want to do it / may not even have other suitable tasks.
Per entering it Thu - No, it’s a timecard and I can’t enter future time onto it. Both in policy and the system won’t allow it.
Sometimes it’s an energy thing being ND I just hit a wall Friday afternoon and it’s the last thing I want to do, so I’m OK with the tradeoff of it being a dumb thing I have to do Friday night… as long as I don’t forget
I really would like to get it down to a more reasonable hour but really want to beemind it being done by the deadline.
I’ve let this marinate in the back of my mind over the last week and I’ve come up with a starter over-engineered solution! it was fun though to finally figure out a solution to something nagging at the back of my mind.
I was inspired by the weight gain/loss goals where you have to stay above/below a relatively flat line.
Solution:
Time submitted Beeminder goal #1
beeminder “weight gain” maintenance goal with the red line set at 0. Slope is 0.
iOS shortcut
when triggered looks up the current date/time and
IF it is Friday, calculates the hours before midnight and sends that to goal #1, effectively tracking how early/late the task is marked complete on Friday
ELSE if it isn’t Friday ie after midnight or some other point during the weekend the shortcut sends -1 to the goal and derails it
metaminder goal #2:
classic do 1x week goal due at midnight Friday. gets a 1 sent to it when a datapoint is added to goal #1 to ensure data is entered weekly.
Thoughts/considerations:
I realize derailments will derail two goals. I also might flip the numbers so that hrs before midnight will be negative instead of positive as that makes more sense to me logically.
I didn’t know for sure if the goal would allow negative datapoints with it being a weight loss/gain goal, but I am glad that it is flexible enough to allow this.
Other things I considered, if I could only show Fridays on the axis ie weekly instead of daily granularity on the X axis, I think this would have been easier to set up initially, maybe?
Weasel holes: can trigger the shortcut button any time I want and as far as I can tell, I can’t force the goal to only accept data from iOS shortcut, not allowing manual entry. I think the metaminder goal solves for tye latter though and not allowing forgetting to trigger the flow.
This does sound neat, but I think I’m a bit confused. I thought the reason you didn’t want to just enter +1 when you do the thing is that you wanted a goal that actually forced you to do it early some amount of the time, but of course if the slope is zero you’ll never have to do that. Is there really a problem with just a goal with a slope of 1/week that is carefully set up when you make it so the initial red day is a Friday?
Good point. I want to Beemind the deadline AND I really wanted to be able to more visually track the trend of when I am completing it, which I feel like the +1 doesn’t provide because it’s at a daily grain.
I forgot to mention that I plan to change the slope from 0 to a small incline so that eventually I can be less edge-skatery about the deadline.
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The long term idea being to use the patterns on the graph as part of reflecting, building systems and learnings about my own ADHD “wall of awful” around this task to be able to consistently complete it earlier.
I tried beeminding doing it earlier this 6 years ago through more traditional means/brute-force willpower and I would constantly derail and didn’t feel like it was productive unlike most of my other goals.
it was fun though to finally figure out a solution to something nagging at the back of my mind.
