So, I want to track a todo list where I assign points to items based on their difficulty, and try to whittle down the number of outstanding points to zero.
It seems that a whittle-down goal would basically do what I want, except that increasing the number of outstanding points would cause a derailment (not sure if that’s true). I guess what I need is for data points that increase the outstanding total to move the road up instead of derailing. Can Beeminder do something like that? Is there a better way to do this?
Thanks for any insight.
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I’ve seen others use a simple ‘Do More To-dos’ goal without difficulty scoring (all to-dos worth ‘1’) combined with an Do Less ‘Age of Oldest item in to-do list’ goal. If you find that you prioritize easy goals and procrastinate on the harder ones in the first goal, then the harder ones will quickly become the oldest- thus forcing you to complete them or derail the second goal.
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Thanks for the ideas, maybe something like that could work for me. I was initially wary about using age or due dates as a proxy for difficulty, because while it makes sense for some tasks, I can think of cases where something is “important” but not urgent and vice versa, which is why I was gravitating towards some kind of points system.
You can split your hardest tasks into smaller ones, so that something you would assign 4 points is turned into 4 “regular” tasks. This way you also have the benefit or knowing how far you are in completing the task and also having some extra “another thing done, i’m awesome” confidence boost 