Not sure if this should be “bug” or “Akrasia”… anyway.
I have a Gmailzero goal which for some reason has gotten out of sync with my Inbox. I’m wondering how to force it to sync.
As of right now, my inbox has 28 read messages. Beeminder is telling me that my goal is “22.2,” which is “Bare min -2 in 0 days”. I know from experience that if I archive two messages, Beeminder will accept this state of affairs, despite my inbox still showing 26 messages.
How can I fix this? I don’t have much of a lifeline, so not derailing in the process is a secondary objective
I’m wondering if this is the same as I discussed in the beemind.me thread (different goal, but same type). If you look at the entered data on the goal, was the value at midnight (or 3AM or whenever your goal change day) about 24? This would then make sense, as you at that time only required to archive 2 more messages by the next day. The emails having joined the fray during the day since midnight, aren’t considered in the required delta/Bare min.
I don’t think it is a bug as such, but an unfortunate design decision (assuming it can’t be configured to behave otherwise).
Edit: That is to say, I believe the goal is resynced at every change of day, but not in between.
For GmailZero you should be able to just hit the refresh button above the graph to force a sync. Does that work?
(I think @larsivi is referring to complications we’re currently discussing with syncing 3rd party integrations. But it shouldn’t be an issue for GmailZero!)
@dreev I don’t think I’m referring to that My opinion is that the goal (or its data) is synced as such, just that the information (delta) that says how much work you need to do today to keep ahead isn’t updated if you get new datapoints during the day. Of course, I may totally misunderstand what I’m seeing as I haven’t used whittle down goals before.
@dreev is confused. @larsivi’s got the right idea, but I’ll elaborate:
Beeminder only counts the minimum seen today (for inbox goals), and thus it gives the delta with respect to that, not with respect to your current inbox count. If you look at the recent datapoints, you’ll probably notice that today’s datapoint gives the minimum you’ve reached over the course of the day, not necessarily the current inbox count. If your count goes up after we get that minimum we do update the datapoint’s comment to mention the most recent count. So given the description above, it sounds like today’s datapoint would look like:
11 24 “Auto-entered by Gmailzero at XX:XX. Most recent count 28.”
(Though that’s probably changed in the 9+ hours since you originally posted…)
So basically because the inbox count can increase over the course of the day the “delta” part of the bare min is not very useful. Just go with the total count, i.e. the 22.2 listed next to the delta of -2.
It does not seem to be time-dependent. I pretty much don’t touch email between midnight and 9:30 AM, when the first Beeminder check happens each day. Is there a time of day when manually editing the value in Beeminder could cause the sync to “drift”?
My opinion is that the goal (or its data) is synced as such, just that the information (delta) that says how much work you need to do today to keep ahead isn’t updated if you get new datapoints during the day. Of course, I may totally misunderstand what I’m seeing as I haven’t used whittle down goals before.