goal that will be red every single day (must be done every day)
after doing it it will not loiter as an orange goal on top of my list
In this specific case it is “water my plants” and I do NOT want it to build buffer. Just three days of not watering plants in summer may kill them (sadly, I tested this - that is why I created this goal).
My “solution” is to
have minimal slope so entering 1 as datapoint will put it as done for 100 days or something
have autoratcheting or script doing this that in the evening will ratchet it back to 0 days
What requires kind of lying what seems a bad precedent, so far I haven’t done this.
My current “solution” is to have like 25 red goals, so orange is not actually on top of list but I hope to change this
So I want to preregister my “this fake datapoints in that goal are not actually cheating” or maybe get a better solution.
Mildly related: I have some goals not doable early in the morning (“call grandmother” is not something that I should be doing at 4 AM even if I wake early). So it would be nice to have ability to hide goals based on some criteria. Criteria could be “no doable at that time”, “already done today >N datapoints” (for example to limit pushup count to sane value to avoid overexertion to give one more use).
It is something that makes me wish for open source Beedroid as it should be relatively easy to introduce hack to listing of goals (with hardcoded behavior specific to me), and right now I would need to write entire Android app to do this…
It’s not quite the Android app itself, but Altbee isopen source. If you want to fork it and make a private self-hosted version for yourself with the hardcoded behavior which works for you, I’d be happy to help you get that set up.
(And you could also add other changes, if you like, such as what you asked for on the other thread with regards for countdown behavior for goals that are in the red.)
Sadly it run a bit into other weirdness: I use Beeminder primarily from phone that deliberately has no browser, often in an offline mode. While packaging Altbee into an app should be possible, loss of offline mode would be also problematic :(
So overall, after work put into it I would exchange one annoyance into another, of a similar severity.
Oh well. Yeah, Altbee is built with Phoenix LiveView, so it’s definitely not usable offline at all.
It would be very nice if the Beeminder Android app was open source, I agree. The iOS version is, so I can’t imagine that there is a fundamental reason why the Android app couldn’t be as well.
Point where I enter datapoint that give slope means “that is enough for 20 days” despite that it is enough only for today.
Maybe I am too careful here, but I was burned before by reasonable and justifiable fudging of datapoints that escalated into blatant lies and fake graphs.
To paraphrase, if you ate ten donuts and you wrote down ten donuts, but you said your commitment was 1 a week with an autoratchet set to make everyday an emergency day, it feels like lying to you because your commitment is not 1/week, right?
Yes. But I also feel that it is being too careful, that is why I am considering to treat this thread as preregistration that fake slope in the goal is not actual slope and that this is perfectly fine.
I’m inclined to believe someone if they say that something feels like a slippery slope to Weaselton.
On the other hand, my next question would be “if that’s lying because the slope-in-and-of-itself is not your true commitment, is autoratchet ever not lying?”
I’d argue that this is what the fine print is for. You can use it to describe something special that you’re doing on this goal (such as using autoratchet in an unusual way), and the Beeminder team will take that into account when judging derailments. As long as you only write fine print for this one goal, you’re still on the hook as far as your other goals go.
I’m pretty sure Beeminder can tell when you last edited your fine print, so you can’t just add new rules to your other graphs when you derail. (Well you can, but they’ll ask some pointed questions about it.)
Count me as a +1 to the original request. I don’t know about OP, but my needs would be met if I could sort my goals by “have not entered data today” (with subsorting by deadline as usual); that way all my one-a-day, every-day goals (of which I have MANY) wouldn’t clutter up the top of my list! I’m not desperate enough to put in excess data every day (although that is a clever workaround), but it would still be a nice feature that would make my goal list happier. It might even make it worthwhile for me to try some of the buffer-building metagoals that people like to tout around here!
As a hacky workaround (maybe) for those points, perhaps Beeminder’s tags would help.
For example, you could have a tag for any goal that is a one-a-day goal and a tag for all other goals and then bookmark the dashboard pages for each and use both each day.
Similarly, have a tag for any goal that you want to do in the morning and a tag for the others.
Details about tags are at Tags + Beeminder = <3 - Is anybody else using this?
NB the www.beeminder.com/tags13 link there should be beeminder (Ping @dreev in case you want to consider editing that link? That thread is the first summary of the tags feature that I found when searching the forum. [[done]])
Also zzq’s lightweight Altbee interface lets you put a tag in the filter box (super-fast usage if your tags are just two characters long to avoid tedious typing ). Altbee — the alternative Beeminder web interface - #16 by beeminder_user
[EDIT: sorry, no, Altbee won’t filter by tags - see my next post here for details]
Wait, sorry, Altbee does not support tags. The tag I tested with happened to also be a word in the description of all the goals that the tag applies to and I think that’s what Altbee was filtering on.
But hey, it’s a great interface and you could totally use words in the description instead of or as well as tags.
It’s unfortunate that tags aren’t exposed in the API, which means that Altbee can’t use them to filter (or sort, for that matter.)
That said, my browser extension has a feature that’s rather similar to Altbee’s filter box, and there you can indeed filter by tags.
If one day Beeminder exposes tags to the API, I’ll be able to add filtering by tag to Altbee. Until that day, if you really want or need tag-based filtering you can try using my browser extension (with the official Beeminder site.)
The extension also allows you to “collapse” goals that you want to minimize: it pushes them to the end of the list, and collapses them to take up much less room. This allows you to put aside goals that you want to get out of the way for the moment. It’s possible that this would help more directly with hiding goals you don’t want to pay any more attention to for the day.
).