I want to beemind my Habitica’s Dalies and To Dos through the official integration.
I have a question.
Let’s say I select the “Do Less” goal to have less To Dos on my list and set a goal of, say, -3 every week.
Let’s say I have 5 To Dos and I complete 4 of them. I only have 1 remaining. If so, I would be on track because I completed 4 To Dos, correct?
What if next week I have, say, just 2 To Dos, and I complete them all. I would still be on track because I don’t have any more stuff to do. Yet, technically, I would have completed only 2 todos, not 3.
Would Beeminder still charge me at that point? Or it will know that no To Dos are there to be completed, thus keeping me on the yellow zone?
Good questions! Thanks for letting us know this was confusing – I don’t love the “less remaining to-dos” metric because it implies to me that certain things will work when they won’t, so it’s always really helpful to get user feedback about this kind of thing.
Correct! And since you have a rate of -3/week, that will carry over and you’ll only need to do -2 the next week.
It wouldn’t know, so either you’d need to have safety buffer (e.g. from completing 4 to-dos the week before!) or you’d be in the red, and would derail.
So, essentially, the way this works is that Beeminder assumes you have more To Dos in your Habitica than your Beeminder’s goal. With that in mind, it generates a linear function according to the goal you set. If you fail to follow/surpass the expected constant of proportionality, it will flag your activity as derailing.
So, basically, it is a way to help you be consistent, assuming you will always have several activities to perform that exceed your weekly/daily goal. It takes a long-term perspective. So, of course, it makes sense to continually increase your maximum number of pushups or a minimum number of candies eaten each week, and the app is there to push yourself in that direction.
However, when it comes to task tracking, it gets a little trickier. I have to try it and see if it makes sense for me, in the way I use Habitica, as I don’t have things to improve (strictly speaking), except my overall productivity—which could be the reason behind having a “Do More” goal in the context of Habitica. Most of the time, I have tasks that are bound to a deadline: once they are completed, that’s it; there is anything more I need to do/improve. And these tasks are usually projects, with multiple tasks within them. So it might happen that a week I only have 2 projects and work like a maniac. But sometimes I might have 5 fairly easy projects. Beeminder won’t care. Even if I was far more productive the week I had 2 hard projects, it would still recognize the 5 easy project week as more productive, even though I might have slacked.
So I have to find a way to make this work with Beeminder’s mechanics. Perhaps I can set up a minimum number of tasks I expect to accomplish within a week and use that as a baseline for an accepted productivity level.
Sure! But the app still assumes you have more tasks to do than your weekly goal (if you complete all your tasks in Habitica, but this number is below your weekly goal, you are being productive, yet the app will still think you are slacking). That’s what I meant there
I use todoist instead of habitica but I believe this idea works for every habit-tracking app.
I had the same problem when I started beeminding my morning routine. For example, I don’t shave every day or there are some days where I don’t need to clean my room or prepare meals. So, instead of tracking a specific number of tasks I have a dummy task labeled “complete morning routine”. That’s the only task I tag as morning-routine and I pledge to complete that one. Which is checked when I feel I have cleared every other task in that group.
I think that you could create a Daily in Habitica. Something like “complete x relevant tasks or have no one pending”. The only downside I see is that you would get free exp in Habitica.
