Is there a way to do this (see post) for *positive* questions?

[grayson]

(Sorry for the opaque post title, but I don’t think I can explain what I’m after without lots more words and maybe pictures.)

I have several goals that ask me weekly yes-or-no questions. For the ones where a “no” answer is the “good” answer, it was easy to set up the graphs so that I can use Beeminder’s color-coding as a visual clue to how bad things are getting. For example, I set up my overwhelm goal as a Do Less with a zero slope, with the bright red line cleverly chosen so that I can track my answers as a trend, rather than a cumulative graph.

There isn’t much data here yet, but hopefully you can see that a “no” answer (= 0 data point) keeps me in the green, whereas each “yes” answer (= 1 data point) will bump me up into blue, then orange — a visual clue that things are going in the wrong direction and I’m not doing enough to put out the fire.

(There’s also a mechanism to come back down to zero, by entering negative numbers if things are better than they were last week. See the Fine Print screenshot below.)

So that’s great! But I can’t figure out how to achieve the same behavior for my weekly-yes-or-no goals where “yes” is the “good” answer. I know I can turn off cumulative data points by making the Do More a custom goal, but I don’t think I can get the color-coding to work — because it’s tied to days of safety buffer. If the red line slope is zero, I don’t get colors at all. (If it’s anything else, I get one day of buffer for blue and one for orange. Since I answer these questions once a week, that isn’t a cue I’m using.) It only works for the Do Less version because the color coding is tied to PPRs (even though I have those turned off).

Anyhoo: if I’ve managed to make this clear to any of you, please let me know if you know a way I can achieve what I want. (Other than turning my “yes is the good answer” goals into “no is the good answer” goals — I can do that, but I’d really rather be asking the positive question for these specific goals. That is, “am I thriving at work?” rather than “is work sucking?” ) Merci for your attention!

[lanthala]

I don’t think you have to reframe the question; just change what ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are: for positive questions, just enter 1 for ‘no’ and 0 for ‘yes’. Or for a more satisfying general formuation: enter ‘0’ if the answer to the question is the desired answer, and answer ‘1’ if the answer is the undesired answer.

Edit: I saw the month of this post but didn’t register the year was last year January problems, I guess.

[grayson]

This is an excellent solution! Thanks for posting.