How can I set multiple daily deadlines without counting the same progress twice?

Newbee
1

Hi,

I currently have a Duolingo goal (built-in integration) in Beeminder that requires me to earn 10 XP per day, with a deadline of 22:00. I also have auto-ratchet set to 0 days, so earning extra XP today doesn’t let me skip tomorrow.

This setup has been really useful for me because I often tend to wait until I have only a few hours left before the deadline to actually do the work. Having Beeminder automatically track my progress and enforce that daily deadline is what keeps me consistent.

I’d like to use that tendency to my advantage by setting two separate deadlines each day, giving myself a reason to practice twice instead of just once.

Ideally, I’d like to have two separate goals:

  • Morning goal: Earn at least 10 XP before 14:00.

  • Evening goal: Earn at least 10 additional XP between 14:00 and 22:00.

Both goals would have auto-ratchet set to 0 days, so I’d have to practice during both periods every single day, regardless of how much XP I earned previously.

For example, if I earn 100 XP at 10:00, my morning goal should be completed, but my evening goal should still require me to earn at least another 10 XP after 14:00. And the next day, both goals should require new progress again.

The idea is to have two separate deadlines that push me to practice at different times of the day, rather than letting me complete everything in one session.

The problem is that I don’t know how to achieve this with Beeminder’s existing Duolingo integration.

I initially thought about creating two Duolingo goals with different deadlines, one requiring 10 XP by 14:00 and another requiring 20 XP by 22:00.

However, Duolingo doesn’t award a consistent amount of XP per lesson. For example, I sometimes practice on the web version, where a lesson might give me 10 XP, and other times on mobile, where a lesson might give me 35 XP or more.

This means that a single morning lesson could potentially satisfy both goals, leaving me with no reason to practice again in the evening.

Is there a way to accomplish what I’m looking for using Beeminder’s existing features or integrations?

One important consideration: I’d really like to keep everything automatic. I’m not interested in manually entering datapoints or running a separate script or automation outside Beeminder.

I can also create custom goals and change their aggregation settings. I’ve looked a bit into things like Metaminder and the different aggregation methods, but I haven’t figured out whether any combination of those could help.

Is there perhaps a way to make a second goal count only new progress made after the first goal’s deadline, rather than the total XP earned throughout the day?

Has anyone managed to set up something similar, or can you think of a way to make this work? Even if the exact setup isn’t possible, I’d love to hear about the closest approximation that would preserve automatic tracking without requiring manual input or external scripts.

Thanks!

1 Like
2

Hello and bom dia ! It’s a good question and a common desire. It’s also really hard to do in Beeminder.

Your intuition about creating multiple goals is right, but it’ll almost certainly require an external script or a workflow in something like make.com

And even then it’s unlikely to be exactly what you want without a lot of work to avoid progress made in the evening counting for the morning. Every method I’ve thought of seems likely to be fragile and break in unexpected ways. On top of that, you may need to manually force refresh the underlying clozemaster/duolingo goals, or to script a similar refresh as the deadline of each separate goal approaches.

Your easiest solution, given that you’re using two tools to learn languages, is to set each of those goals with a different deadline. e.g. Duolingo until midnight, Clozemaster until noon, both set to autoratchet to zero each day.

The other thing I’ve done, is to study the opposite language pair using a separate goal. i.e. study both French for German speakers and German for French speakers.

Fun fact: I started doing this back when Duolingo had fewer language pairs, so the only way to learn Dutch with it was to study English for Dutch speakers. In those days you could also reach the end of the lessons because there was only so much content.

Let us know what you come up with.

1 Like