But I want to be able to beemind the total number of tasks due today. (Also I’m interested in being able to beemind the total number to today or earlier.) If I set it at a constant of, say, 5, then every day there cannot be more than 5 uncompleted tasks due that day. If I set it to a constant of 0 then it means by the end of the day there must be no more uncompleted tasks due that day.
It’s a bit like inbox zero, but not for the actual inbox “project” in Todoist; rather it’s for the current day. I’m interested in this because I want to use the Systemist method and I want to beemind it.
It’s hard to have a variable number of tasks each day as the Beeminder goal, as the “number of ToDos for today” would then be “today’s slope for the bright red goal line”, and you can’t change that less than 7 days in advance (due to the akrasia horizon). So you’d have to know a week or more in advance what your to-do list was for the day, which is improbable.
Maybe you could calculate the fraction of today’s tasks completed? So the goal is 100% (which you could set as a constant slope of 1.0), and if you achieve 70% of those then that’s what you’d record (with 0.7 as a datapoint).
You’d have to do the calculation of percent complete somewhere - definitely doable in principle through some custom scripts and the API, but I don’t know IFTTT or Zapier well enough to know if you could use them.
That’s not what I want. I don’t want to track the number of tasks completed (needing to adjust the slop depending on how many tasks are due). I want to track the number of uncompleted tasks on today’s due date.
Ah, I see! Sorry, I misunderstood: if you have 7 uncompleted tasks for today, you want to log the value 7, is that right?
Looks like you could do this via a script, as you can retrieve a list of active tasks, filtered by due-date of today. You’d want to make decisions like “do I count tasks due yesterday but not done?”, all of which look do-able. There seem to be some command-line interfaces for Todoist out there, too, which might help if you’re not up to much coding.
So I’d need to have the script hosted on some VPS or something, right?
You definitely could do it that way! I’d just have a script locally on my machine, I think. I have several already myself, to do things like “count the number of red goals”. When I run them they automatically send a datapoint to Beeminder. So you’d just have something like that, which you run by hand, or have a little scheduler to run for you.
Although then I’d have to make sure my machine was powered up and online at the right time each day, right? Whereas a VPS or the GCP scheduler would be continuous.
Although then I’d have to make sure my machine was powered up and online at the right time each day, right? Whereas a VPS or the GCP scheduler would be continuous.
Correct! I leave my machine on all the time as it does various house-serving functions, but ymmv, and then I’m probably go with the GCP scheduler (probably lower cost than a VPS, unless you can maybe schedule the VPS to turn on and off each day for just a few minutes?)