This is a hand-holding walk through of how to set up your Android device to Beemind from the lock screen. This lousy photo (sorry!) shows my lock screen with two notifications that I can swipe to log a habit or event with Beeminder.
The advantages are that it’s quick, and because you don’t have to unlock your phone there is less opportunity to get distracted by something else on there. My phone limits me to three visible notifications, which is perfect if you want to track something like BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits.
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Get yourself the Beeminder Android App and the Automate App. Both of these apps are free. Automate is a Tasker competitor that rivals Tasker on functionality, is cheaper and easier to use.
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Open the Beeminder app, sign in and let it sync your goals.
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Open Automate and make a new ‘flow’ by pressing the plus symbol.
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Press the tools in the corner to add a new ‘block’.
The block we are after is called “Notification show”. Search for it in the search bar and select it from the list.
6. This will place a new block on the screen. Tap it to configure it.
- Set proceed to ‘When cancelled’
- Set the title of the notification. This will show on your lock screen.
- If you set a message this will show below the title in the notification.
- Set Priority to ‘High’ or ‘Maximum’ to ensure the notification shows. Maximum prioirty will show above high priority so you can use this to manipulate the order of the notifications if you wish.
- Set visibility to ‘Public’
- Ignore the category section
- Scroll down and check the box next to ‘Cancellable’
- You do not need to change anything else. Press ‘Done’ in the top right corner.
7.Add the plug-in action block by clicking on the tools and searching for it.
8. Click on the block to configure it.
- Tap on pick plug-in and select Beeminder. The Beeminder configuration should appear.
- Select your goal.
- Set task type to ‘submit value’ and enter the value you want to be automatically entered from the lock screen. You can also use the timer - more details below.
- Join up your blocks by dragging the nodes together. Once your flow looks like the image, tap the tick in the top right to save the flow.
- Click on
<untitled>to change the name and description. Press ‘OK’ and the press the ‘Start’ button. Your tracker should now be available in your notifications and lock screen. Just swipe the notification away to log!
- If you want your tracker to be available without manually starting it from Automate you will need to tell Automate to run it when the phone boots. Click on the three dots in the top right to open the settings.
To control a Beeminder timer from the lock screen you need to use the start and stop timer tasks in the Beeminder plug-in configuration, with the flow shown below.
Let me know if you run into any issues.