low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

The original derailment was not legit…but then my inaction made them become legit.

-Jolly

-----Original Message-----
From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Reeves
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 7:52 PM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

For those reading along I thought I’d re-emphasize that we never count a derailment as legit if you did the work but just didn’t enter the data in time.
If that happens just enter the retroactive data (even though the graph is frozen) and then reply to the legitimacy check email to say that it was just a matter of not getting the data in on time.

So, Jolly, I’m nervous that Beeminder did you wrong with your derailments. Unless your “then later derailing entirely” means that they turned out to be legit.
It sounds like the solution for you will be to automate the data entry. Let’s keep talking about this!

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

That relies on me rememebering to turn it back on…and also assumes im
within internet range ect and not supremely busy.

(I recently defaulted on a LOT of goals by having the time to do the
goals…but not log it into beeminder…and then later derailing
entirely)

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 12:50 PM

To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I think the key phrase there is “in the future”. I’d also like to be
able to tell Beeminder that I’m going on holiday and to pause my roads
for a given date range. But it would defeat the purpose and benefit
of Beeminder for me if I could pause the road immediately on a stressful day.

To manage this right now, I put a reminder in my calendar a week ahead
of the event. I’ll put an equivalent reminder to dial it back up a
week before the break’s end, but that’s less urgent. Not ideal, not
particularly onerous.

Philip

On 14 August 2012 14:37, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I’d really like a way to program in rises/drops in the road in the future.
IE - I’m going to burning man this week, stop tracking my goals.

I’ve currently stopped using beeminder right now due to this or
another easy way to pause goals :confused:

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 5:13 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

The akrasia horizon is asymmetric. It’s a useful enforced delay
before dialling down a road, but can be a frustrating delay when I’m
keen to dial up the difficulty straight away. (It can be a
frustrating delay on the way down, too, but that’s the whole point!)

The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon | Beeminder Blog suggests that some of us will resist
dialling it down because we’ll be convinced that we’ll have our act
together by the time a week passes. For me, the ‘only another week’
energy burst only kicks in once I’ve adjusted the road and can see the
future slope change. During the week, I might discover that it’s
sustainable and want to maintain my (still current) slope.

It’s useful to have the option of a delay for slope increases, because
sometimes I want it steeper today, or maybe I’m in the mood to force
the pace from tomorrow, or the beginning of next month, or whatever.
‘Right now’ isn’t always the best option.

I also have some goals that warrant a “hip-hugging” road; one that
encourages a minimum level of effort each week, and doesn’t let me
build up too much of a safety buffer. If I want to do X at least
twice a week, the fact that I managed it 5 times this week doesn’t
change my desire to do another 2 next week. These goals are
characterised by a weekly rate and an arbitrary end date, but not a goal total.

In terms of baskets of tasks, I might give the Reeves Must-Do method a
try-out. I have 3 other mechanisms active right now.

First is tracking the number of cycles I do on my task list, using
Mark Forster’s “final version” to process the list. This sounds
spiritually akin to Paul’s use of RTM, without points-per-task.

Second is a bundle of 3 aspirationaly-daily activities; doing any one
gives me a point, and I can get ahead or catch up by doing one of
each. By bundling these into a single goal, I escape the problems
inherent in beeminding a once-per-day-7-days-per-week activity.
(Obviously, setting a slope of 21 per week would negate that solution;
my current slope is 10.5, and I anticipate growing it to at most
17.5.)

Third is general time-tracking; must spend at least X hours per week
on this focus area. As much as I hate using time as a proxy for
progress, it’s relatively easy to measure, and is semi-automated using TagTime.

Philip

twitter.com/PhilipHellyer

On 14 August 2012 06:38, Melanie Reeves Wicklow melzafish@gmail.com wrote:

It probably is overkill for all but weight loss or similar goals.
Weight loss might even be fine with 3-4 days.

On Monday, August 13, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Yeah, this may be the key to the power of the One Must-Do Task!
And if it works it may mean that a one-week akrasia horizon is overkill.

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Melanie Reeves Wicklow
melzafish@gmail.com wrote:

Hmm, I think I like that better than my “getrdone” list. After a
while, it didn’t really guide me. I’d just see what I had done from
the list when it was an emergency day or close to it and record it,
but the endlessly procrastinated tasks still weren’t happening, only
ones that had a deadline.
But with this, the previous day when you swear it’ll be easy to do x
y or z, you lock yourself in to that task. I’ve tried similar things
like only writing down the 3 most important tasks for the next day.
But no system to force them done.

On Sunday, August 12, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

I’m excited to try Paul Fenwick’s scheme below, but in the meantime
Bethany and I are trying something dirt simple that may capture
enough of the spirit of this to be valuable.

The idea is to pick one task that you Must Do the next day. You have
to write down the task the night before and it counts if you
actually do it the next day. You then commit to some number of such
tasks per week.

How to do that with Beeminder (the idea is to use the previous day’s
datapoint comment to commit to the next day’s task):

  1. Create a Do More goal like mustdo – d – beeminder 2. Add an
    initial datapoint like
    ^ 0 “tmw: file tps report”
    which commits you to filing your tps report tomorrow.
  2. The next day, if you filed your tps report, enter a new
    datapoint, along with a new task, like
    ^ 1 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report then
    ^ 0 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report but still need to (before
    you can take over the world) then like
    ^ 0 “tmw: ditto”
  3. Dial up your road to commit to however many tasks per week you
    want to commit to. (I’m starting with 3.5/week – one every other
    day.) 5. Rule: always enter your datapoint with a caret. You have to
    finish the day’s task – and specify tomorrow’s – by midnight.

If you want to get ambitious you can enter compound tasks (“file tps
report and clip toenails”) and still make the datapoints binary.

My datapoint yesterday read “tmw: describe this system on akratics
anonymous” so after I hit send I’ll give myself a 1 for today and
pick a task for tomorrow!

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Paul Fenwick
paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com
wrote:

Daniel’s just told me I need to join AA for a discussion going on
here, and I suspect this is it. :slight_smile:

So, in a nutshell, I’ve linked my TODO trakcer (RememberTheMilk)
to Beeminder. I get points for completing tasks (joining AA just
scored me one point), with things like work tasks, and ‘hard’
tasks being worth much more.
(Points are configurable by list and/or tag). Of course,
Beeminder lets me set how many points I score each week before I
start losing money. :slight_smile:

I also have the problem of some tasks never getting done, so I
have a few ideas on how to encourage me:

  • Dynamic point values. Tasks are worth more points the longer
    they stick around, so eventually I’ll be encouraged to stop
    procrastinating and do the task I’ve been putting off.
  • As above, but tasks are worth less points the longer they
    stick around.
    This is dangerous, because eventually it becomes easier to scrap a
    task than complete it.
  • Staleness penalties. Tasks start generating negative points if
    they stick around too long, even if they don’t have a due date.
    Some lists (eg,


Sent from my iPhone http://beeminder.com


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

Thanks, I’ve been meaning to set up a command line interface to beeminder… :slight_smile:

-Jolly

-----Original Message-----
From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Paul Fenwick
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 1:55 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I would deeply love the ability to set changes in the future as well; Burning Man is a great example of something where I’m likely to forget to flatten a road a week beforehand, or re-enable it afterwards.

As for submitting data-points, I’ve found both the android app and the API to be supremely useful. Being able to type at my command-line:

$ bmndr floss 1

Is much easier than navigating to the website. Since Daniel and Bethany have told me that they don’t mind me showing off code that uses the new API, I can tell you that it’s as easy as (in Perl):

my ($user, $auth_token, $datapoint, $comment);  # You'll need to fill these in. :)

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize( autocheck => 1 )

$mech->post(
    "http://beeminder.com/api/v1/users/$user/goals/$goal/datapoints.json?auth_token=$auth_token",
    {
        timestamp => time(),
        value => $datapoint,
        comment => $comment
    }
);

The code I actually use for submission is at: bmndr code · GitHub

Cheerio,

Paul

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

That relies on me rememebering to turn it back on…and also assumes im
within internet range ect and not supremely busy.

(I recently defaulted on a LOT of goals by having the time to do the
goals…but not log it into beeminder…and then later derailing
entirely)

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 12:50 PM

To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I think the key phrase there is “in the future”. I’d also like to be
able to tell Beeminder that I’m going on holiday and to pause my roads
for a given date range. But it would defeat the purpose and benefit
of Beeminder for me if I could pause the road immediately on a stressful day.

To manage this right now, I put a reminder in my calendar a week ahead
of the event. I’ll put an equivalent reminder to dial it back up a
week before the break’s end, but that’s less urgent. Not ideal, not
particularly onerous.

Philip

On 14 August 2012 14:37, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I’d really like a way to program in rises/drops in the road in the future.
IE - I’m going to burning man this week, stop tracking my goals.

I’ve currently stopped using beeminder right now due to this or
another easy way to pause goals :confused:

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 5:13 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

The akrasia horizon is asymmetric. It’s a useful enforced delay
before dialling down a road, but can be a frustrating delay when I’m
keen to dial up the difficulty straight away. (It can be a
frustrating delay on the way down, too, but that’s the whole point!)

The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon | Beeminder Blog suggests that some of us will resist
dialling it down because we’ll be convinced that we’ll have our act
together by the time a week passes. For me, the ‘only another week’
energy burst only kicks in once I’ve adjusted the road and can see the
future slope change. During the week, I might discover that it’s
sustainable and want to maintain my (still current) slope.

It’s useful to have the option of a delay for slope increases, because
sometimes I want it steeper today, or maybe I’m in the mood to force
the pace from tomorrow, or the beginning of next month, or whatever.
‘Right now’ isn’t always the best option.

I also have some goals that warrant a “hip-hugging” road; one that
encourages a minimum level of effort each week, and doesn’t let me
build up too much of a safety buffer. If I want to do X at least
twice a week, the fact that I managed it 5 times this week doesn’t
change my desire to do another 2 next week. These goals are
characterised by a weekly rate and an arbitrary end date, but not a goal total.

In terms of baskets of tasks, I might give the Reeves Must-Do method a
try-out. I have 3 other mechanisms active right now.

First is tracking the number of cycles I do on my task list, using
Mark Forster’s “final version” to process the list. This sounds
spiritually akin to Paul’s use of RTM, without points-per-task.

Second is a bundle of 3 aspirationaly-daily activities; doing any one
gives me a point, and I can get ahead or catch up by doing one of
each. By bundling these into a single goal, I escape the problems
inherent in beeminding a once-per-day-7-days-per-week activity.
(Obviously, setting a slope of 21 per week would negate that solution;
my current slope is 10.5, and I anticipate growing it to at most
17.5.)

Third is general time-tracking; must spend at least X hours per week
on this focus area. As much as I hate using time as a proxy for
progress, it’s relatively easy to measure, and is semi-automated using TagTime.

Philip

twitter.com/PhilipHellyer

On 14 August 2012 06:38, Melanie Reeves Wicklow melzafish@gmail.com wrote:

It probably is overkill for all but weight loss or similar goals.
Weight loss might even be fine with 3-4 days.

On Monday, August 13, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Yeah, this may be the key to the power of the One Must-Do Task!
And if it works it may mean that a one-week akrasia horizon is overkill.

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Melanie Reeves Wicklow
melzafish@gmail.com wrote:

Hmm, I think I like that better than my “getrdone” list. After a
while, it didn’t really guide me. I’d just see what I had done from
the list when it was an emergency day or close to it and record it,
but the endlessly procrastinated tasks still weren’t happening, only
ones that had a deadline.
But with this, the previous day when you swear it’ll be easy to do x
y or z, you lock yourself in to that task. I’ve tried similar things
like only writing down the 3 most important tasks for the next day.
But no system to force them done.

On Sunday, August 12, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

I’m excited to try Paul Fenwick’s scheme below, but in the meantime
Bethany and I are trying something dirt simple that may capture
enough of the spirit of this to be valuable.

The idea is to pick one task that you Must Do the next day. You have
to write down the task the night before and it counts if you
actually do it the next day. You then commit to some number of such
tasks per week.

How to do that with Beeminder (the idea is to use the previous day’s
datapoint comment to commit to the next day’s task):

  1. Create a Do More goal like mustdo – d – beeminder 2. Add an
    initial datapoint like
    ^ 0 “tmw: file tps report”
    which commits you to filing your tps report tomorrow.
  2. The next day, if you filed your tps report, enter a new
    datapoint, along with a new task, like
    ^ 1 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report then
    ^ 0 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report but still need to (before
    you can take over the world) then like
    ^ 0 “tmw: ditto”
  3. Dial up your road to commit to however many tasks per week you
    want to commit to. (I’m starting with 3.5/week – one every other
    day.) 5. Rule: always enter your datapoint with a caret. You have to
    finish the day’s task – and specify tomorrow’s – by midnight.

If you want to get ambitious you can enter compound tasks (“file tps
report and clip toenails”) and still make the datapoints binary.

My datapoint yesterday read “tmw: describe this system on akratics
anonymous” so after I hit send I’ll give myself a 1 for today and
pick a task for tomorrow!

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Paul Fenwick
paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com
wrote:

Daniel’s just told me I need to join AA for a discussion going on
here, and I suspect this is it. :slight_smile:

So, in a nutshell, I’ve linked my TODO trakcer (RememberTheMilk)
to Beeminder. I get points for completing tasks (joining AA just
scored me one point), with things like work tasks, and ‘hard’
tasks being worth much more.
(Points are configurable by list and/or tag). Of course,
Beeminder lets me set how many points I score each week before I
start losing money. :slight_smile:

I also have the problem of some tasks never getting done, so I
have a few ideas on how to encourage me:

  • Dynamic point values. Tasks are worth more points the longer
    they stick around, so eventually I’ll be encouraged to stop
    procrastinating and do the task I’ve been putting off.
  • As above, but tasks are worth less points the longer they
    stick around.
    This is dangerous, because eventually it becomes easier to scrap a
    task than complete it.
  • Staleness penalties. Tasks start generating negative points if
    they stick around too long, even if they don’t have a due date.
    Some lists (eg,


Sent from my iPhone http://beeminder.com

What I’ve started doing is taking advantage of beeminders text feature (and I have a txt to jabber setup)
Now, I just instant message beeminder with data
Like
Creatine ^ 1
Floss ^ 1 “morning”
Brush ^ 1 “morning”

-Jolly

-----Original Message-----
From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Paul Fenwick
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 1:55 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I would deeply love the ability to set changes in the future as well; Burning
Man is a great example of something where I’m likely to forget to flatten a
road a week beforehand, or re-enable it afterwards.

As for submitting data-points, I’ve found both the android app and the API to
be supremely useful. Being able to type at my command-line:

$ bmndr floss 1

Is much easier than navigating to the website. Since Daniel and Bethany
have told me that they don’t mind me showing off code that uses the new
API, I can tell you that it’s as easy as (in Perl):

my ($user, $auth_token, $datapoint, $comment);  # You'll need to fill these

in. :slight_smile:

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize( autocheck => 1 )

$mech->post(

http://beeminder.com/api/v1/users/$user/goals/$goal/datapoints.json?au
th_token=$auth_token”,
{
timestamp => time(),
value => $datapoint,
comment => $comment
}
);

The code I actually use for submission is at: bmndr code · GitHub

Cheerio,

Paul

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

That relies on me rememebering to turn it back on…and also assumes im
within internet range ect and not supremely busy.

(I recently defaulted on a LOT of goals by having the time to do the
goals…but not log it into beeminder…and then later derailing
entirely)

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 12:50 PM

To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I think the key phrase there is “in the future”. I’d also like to be
able to tell Beeminder that I’m going on holiday and to pause my roads
for a given date range. But it would defeat the purpose and benefit
of Beeminder for me if I could pause the road immediately on a stressful
day.

To manage this right now, I put a reminder in my calendar a week ahead
of the event. I’ll put an equivalent reminder to dial it back up a
week before the break’s end, but that’s less urgent. Not ideal, not
particularly onerous.

Philip

On 14 August 2012 14:37, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I’d really like a way to program in rises/drops in the road in the future.
IE - I’m going to burning man this week, stop tracking my goals.

I’ve currently stopped using beeminder right now due to this or
another easy way to pause goals :confused:

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 5:13 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

The akrasia horizon is asymmetric. It’s a useful enforced delay
before dialling down a road, but can be a frustrating delay when I’m
keen to dial up the difficulty straight away. (It can be a
frustrating delay on the way down, too, but that’s the whole point!)

The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon | Beeminder Blog suggests that some of us will resist
dialling it down because we’ll be convinced that we’ll have our act
together by the time a week passes. For me, the ‘only another week’
energy burst only kicks in once I’ve adjusted the road and can see the
future slope change. During the week, I might discover that it’s
sustainable and want to maintain my (still current) slope.

It’s useful to have the option of a delay for slope increases, because
sometimes I want it steeper today, or maybe I’m in the mood to force
the pace from tomorrow, or the beginning of next month, or whatever.
‘Right now’ isn’t always the best option.

I also have some goals that warrant a “hip-hugging” road; one that
encourages a minimum level of effort each week, and doesn’t let me
build up too much of a safety buffer. If I want to do X at least
twice a week, the fact that I managed it 5 times this week doesn’t
change my desire to do another 2 next week. These goals are
characterised by a weekly rate and an arbitrary end date, but not a goal
total.

In terms of baskets of tasks, I might give the Reeves Must-Do method a
try-out. I have 3 other mechanisms active right now.

First is tracking the number of cycles I do on my task list, using
Mark Forster’s “final version” to process the list. This sounds
spiritually akin to Paul’s use of RTM, without points-per-task.

Second is a bundle of 3 aspirationaly-daily activities; doing any one
gives me a point, and I can get ahead or catch up by doing one of
each. By bundling these into a single goal, I escape the problems
inherent in beeminding a once-per-day-7-days-per-week activity.
(Obviously, setting a slope of 21 per week would negate that solution;
my current slope is 10.5, and I anticipate growing it to at most
17.5.)

Third is general time-tracking; must spend at least X hours per week
on this focus area. As much as I hate using time as a proxy for
progress, it’s relatively easy to measure, and is semi-automated using
TagTime.

Philip

twitter.com/PhilipHellyer

On 14 August 2012 06:38, Melanie Reeves Wicklow melzafish@gmail.com
wrote:

It probably is overkill for all but weight loss or similar goals.
Weight loss might even be fine with 3-4 days.

On Monday, August 13, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Yeah, this may be the key to the power of the One Must-Do Task!
And if it works it may mean that a one-week akrasia horizon is overkill.

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Melanie Reeves Wicklow
melzafish@gmail.com wrote:

Hmm, I think I like that better than my “getrdone” list. After a
while, it didn’t really guide me. I’d just see what I had done from
the list when it was an emergency day or close to it and record it,
but the endlessly procrastinated tasks still weren’t happening, only
ones that had a deadline.
But with this, the previous day when you swear it’ll be easy to do x
y or z, you lock yourself in to that task. I’ve tried similar things
like only writing down the 3 most important tasks for the next day.
But no system to force them done.

On Sunday, August 12, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

I’m excited to try Paul Fenwick’s scheme below, but in the meantime
Bethany and I are trying something dirt simple that may capture
enough of the spirit of this to be valuable.

The idea is to pick one task that you Must Do the next day. You have
to write down the task the night before and it counts if you
actually do it the next day. You then commit to some number of such
tasks per week.

How to do that with Beeminder (the idea is to use the previous day’s
datapoint comment to commit to the next day’s task):

  1. Create a Do More goal like mustdo – d – beeminder 2. Add an
    initial datapoint like
    ^ 0 “tmw: file tps report”
    which commits you to filing your tps report tomorrow.
  2. The next day, if you filed your tps report, enter a new
    datapoint, along with a new task, like
    ^ 1 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report then
    ^ 0 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report but still need to (before
    you can take over the world) then like
    ^ 0 “tmw: ditto”
  3. Dial up your road to commit to however many tasks per week you
    want to commit to. (I’m starting with 3.5/week – one every other
    day.) 5. Rule: always enter your datapoint with a caret. You have to
    finish the day’s task – and specify tomorrow’s – by midnight.

If you want to get ambitious you can enter compound tasks (“file tps
report and clip toenails”) and still make the datapoints binary.

My datapoint yesterday read “tmw: describe this system on akratics
anonymous” so after I hit send I’ll give myself a 1 for today and
pick a task for tomorrow!

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Paul Fenwick
paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com
wrote:

Daniel’s just told me I need to join AA for a discussion going on
here, and I suspect this is it. :slight_smile:

So, in a nutshell, I’ve linked my TODO trakcer (RememberTheMilk)
to Beeminder. I get points for completing tasks (joining AA just
scored me one point), with things like work tasks, and ‘hard’
tasks being worth much more.
(Points are configurable by list and/or tag). Of course,
Beeminder lets me set how many points I score each week before I
start losing money. :slight_smile:

I also have the problem of some tasks never getting done, so I
have a few ideas on how to encourage me:

  • Dynamic point values. Tasks are worth more points the longer
    they stick around, so eventually I’ll be encouraged to stop
    procrastinating and do the task I’ve been putting off.
  • As above, but tasks are worth less points the longer they
    stick around.
    This is dangerous, because eventually it becomes easier to scrap a
    task than complete it.
  • Staleness penalties. Tasks start generating negative points if
    they stick around too long, even if they don’t have a due date.
    Some lists (eg,


Sent from my iPhone http://beeminder.com

sweet! you mean you have an IM-to-SMS gateway where you can send an IM
and it gets sent as an SMS to the beeminder bot?
what are you using for that?

pro-tip: you can use any unique prefix of your goal slugs for the sms bot.
so like if your flossing goal is the only one that starts with f you
could just do
f ^ 1

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

What I’ve started doing is taking advantage of beeminders text feature (and I have a txt to jabber setup)
Now, I just instant message beeminder with data
Like
Creatine ^ 1
Floss ^ 1 “morning”
Brush ^ 1 “morning”

-Jolly

-----Original Message-----
From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Paul Fenwick
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 1:55 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I would deeply love the ability to set changes in the future as well; Burning
Man is a great example of something where I’m likely to forget to flatten a
road a week beforehand, or re-enable it afterwards.

As for submitting data-points, I’ve found both the android app and the API to
be supremely useful. Being able to type at my command-line:

$ bmndr floss 1

Is much easier than navigating to the website. Since Daniel and Bethany
have told me that they don’t mind me showing off code that uses the new
API, I can tell you that it’s as easy as (in Perl):

my ($user, $auth_token, $datapoint, $comment);  # You'll need to fill these

in. :slight_smile:

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize( autocheck => 1 )

$mech->post(

http://beeminder.com/api/v1/users/$user/goals/$goal/datapoints.json?au
th_token=$auth_token”,
{
timestamp => time(),
value => $datapoint,
comment => $comment
}
);

The code I actually use for submission is at: bmndr code · GitHub

Cheerio,

Paul

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

That relies on me rememebering to turn it back on…and also assumes im
within internet range ect and not supremely busy.

(I recently defaulted on a LOT of goals by having the time to do the
goals…but not log it into beeminder…and then later derailing
entirely)

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 12:50 PM

To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I think the key phrase there is “in the future”. I’d also like to be
able to tell Beeminder that I’m going on holiday and to pause my roads
for a given date range. But it would defeat the purpose and benefit
of Beeminder for me if I could pause the road immediately on a stressful
day.

To manage this right now, I put a reminder in my calendar a week ahead
of the event. I’ll put an equivalent reminder to dial it back up a
week before the break’s end, but that’s less urgent. Not ideal, not
particularly onerous.

Philip

On 14 August 2012 14:37, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I’d really like a way to program in rises/drops in the road in the future.
IE - I’m going to burning man this week, stop tracking my goals.

I’ve currently stopped using beeminder right now due to this or
another easy way to pause goals :confused:

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 5:13 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

The akrasia horizon is asymmetric. It’s a useful enforced delay
before dialling down a road, but can be a frustrating delay when I’m
keen to dial up the difficulty straight away. (It can be a
frustrating delay on the way down, too, but that’s the whole point!)

The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon | Beeminder Blog suggests that some of us will resist
dialling it down because we’ll be convinced that we’ll have our act
together by the time a week passes. For me, the ‘only another week’
energy burst only kicks in once I’ve adjusted the road and can see the
future slope change. During the week, I might discover that it’s
sustainable and want to maintain my (still current) slope.

It’s useful to have the option of a delay for slope increases, because
sometimes I want it steeper today, or maybe I’m in the mood to force
the pace from tomorrow, or the beginning of next month, or whatever.
‘Right now’ isn’t always the best option.

I also have some goals that warrant a “hip-hugging” road; one that
encourages a minimum level of effort each week, and doesn’t let me
build up too much of a safety buffer. If I want to do X at least
twice a week, the fact that I managed it 5 times this week doesn’t
change my desire to do another 2 next week. These goals are
characterised by a weekly rate and an arbitrary end date, but not a goal
total.

In terms of baskets of tasks, I might give the Reeves Must-Do method a
try-out. I have 3 other mechanisms active right now.

First is tracking the number of cycles I do on my task list, using
Mark Forster’s “final version” to process the list. This sounds
spiritually akin to Paul’s use of RTM, without points-per-task.

Second is a bundle of 3 aspirationaly-daily activities; doing any one
gives me a point, and I can get ahead or catch up by doing one of
each. By bundling these into a single goal, I escape the problems
inherent in beeminding a once-per-day-7-days-per-week activity.
(Obviously, setting a slope of 21 per week would negate that solution;
my current slope is 10.5, and I anticipate growing it to at most
17.5.)

Third is general time-tracking; must spend at least X hours per week
on this focus area. As much as I hate using time as a proxy for
progress, it’s relatively easy to measure, and is semi-automated using
TagTime.

Philip

twitter.com/PhilipHellyer

On 14 August 2012 06:38, Melanie Reeves Wicklow melzafish@gmail.com
wrote:

It probably is overkill for all but weight loss or similar goals.
Weight loss might even be fine with 3-4 days.

On Monday, August 13, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Yeah, this may be the key to the power of the One Must-Do Task!
And if it works it may mean that a one-week akrasia horizon is overkill.

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Melanie Reeves Wicklow
melzafish@gmail.com wrote:

Hmm, I think I like that better than my “getrdone” list. After a
while, it didn’t really guide me. I’d just see what I had done from
the list when it was an emergency day or close to it and record it,
but the endlessly procrastinated tasks still weren’t happening, only
ones that had a deadline.
But with this, the previous day when you swear it’ll be easy to do x
y or z, you lock yourself in to that task. I’ve tried similar things
like only writing down the 3 most important tasks for the next day.
But no system to force them done.

On Sunday, August 12, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

I’m excited to try Paul Fenwick’s scheme below, but in the meantime
Bethany and I are trying something dirt simple that may capture
enough of the spirit of this to be valuable.

The idea is to pick one task that you Must Do the next day. You have
to write down the task the night before and it counts if you
actually do it the next day. You then commit to some number of such
tasks per week.

How to do that with Beeminder (the idea is to use the previous day’s
datapoint comment to commit to the next day’s task):

  1. Create a Do More goal like mustdo – d – beeminder 2. Add an
    initial datapoint like
    ^ 0 “tmw: file tps report”
    which commits you to filing your tps report tomorrow.
  2. The next day, if you filed your tps report, enter a new
    datapoint, along with a new task, like
    ^ 1 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report then
    ^ 0 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report but still need to (before
    you can take over the world) then like
    ^ 0 “tmw: ditto”
  3. Dial up your road to commit to however many tasks per week you
    want to commit to. (I’m starting with 3.5/week – one every other
    day.) 5. Rule: always enter your datapoint with a caret. You have to
    finish the day’s task – and specify tomorrow’s – by midnight.

If you want to get ambitious you can enter compound tasks (“file tps
report and clip toenails”) and still make the datapoints binary.

My datapoint yesterday read “tmw: describe this system on akratics
anonymous” so after I hit send I’ll give myself a 1 for today and
pick a task for tomorrow!

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Paul Fenwick
paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com
wrote:

Daniel’s just told me I need to join AA for a discussion going on
here, and I suspect this is it. :slight_smile:

So, in a nutshell, I’ve linked my TODO trakcer (RememberTheMilk)
to Beeminder. I get points for completing tasks (joining AA just
scored me one point), with things like work tasks, and ‘hard’
tasks being worth much more.
(Points are configurable by list and/or tag). Of course,
Beeminder lets me set how many points I score each week before I
start losing money. :slight_smile:

I also have the problem of some tasks never getting done, so I
have a few ideas on how to encourage me:

  • Dynamic point values. Tasks are worth more points the longer
    they stick around, so eventually I’ll be encouraged to stop
    procrastinating and do the task I’ve been putting off.
  • As above, but tasks are worth less points the longer they
    stick around.
    This is dangerous, because eventually it becomes easier to scrap a
    task than complete it.
  • Staleness penalties. Tasks start generating negative points if
    they stick around too long, even if they don’t have a due date.
    Some lists (eg,


Sent from my iPhone http://beeminder.com


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

Technically I’m going from
Beeminder text alert —> google voice → email → forwarded to → gvmax → xmpp (google talk)

Sort of convoluted, but works surprisingly well.
https://www.gvmax.com/signup/

-Jolly

-----Original Message-----
From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On
Behalf Of Daniel Reeves
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2012 7:32 PM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

sweet! you mean you have an IM-to-SMS gateway where you can send an
IM and it gets sent as an SMS to the beeminder bot?
what are you using for that?

pro-tip: you can use any unique prefix of your goal slugs for the sms bot.
so like if your flossing goal is the only one that starts with f you could just do
f ^ 1

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

What I’ve started doing is taking advantage of beeminders text feature
(and I have a txt to jabber setup) Now, I just instant message
beeminder with data Like Creatine ^ 1 Floss ^ 1 “morning”
Brush ^ 1 “morning”

-Jolly

-----Original Message-----
From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com]
On
Behalf Of Paul Fenwick
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 1:55 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I would deeply love the ability to set changes in the future as well;
Burning Man is a great example of something where I’m likely to
forget to flatten a road a week beforehand, or re-enable it afterwards.

As for submitting data-points, I’ve found both the android app and
the API to be supremely useful. Being able to type at my command-line:

$ bmndr floss 1

Is much easier than navigating to the website. Since Daniel and
Bethany have told me that they don’t mind me showing off code that
uses the new API, I can tell you that it’s as easy as (in Perl):

my ($user, $auth_token, $datapoint, $comment);  # You'll need to

fill these in. :slight_smile:

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize( autocheck => 1 )

$mech->post(

"http://beeminder.com/api/v1/users/$user/goals/$goal/datapoints.json?

au
th_token=$auth_token",
{
timestamp => time(),
value => $datapoint,
comment => $comment
}
);

The code I actually use for submission is at:
bmndr code · GitHub

Cheerio,

Paul

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com
wrote:

That relies on me rememebering to turn it back on…and also
assumes im within internet range ect and not supremely busy.

(I recently defaulted on a LOT of goals by having the time to do
the goals…but not log it into beeminder…and then later
derailing
entirely)

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com]
On Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 12:50 PM

To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

I think the key phrase there is “in the future”. I’d also like to
be able to tell Beeminder that I’m going on holiday and to pause my
roads for a given date range. But it would defeat the purpose and
benefit of Beeminder for me if I could pause the road immediately
on a stressful
day.

To manage this right now, I put a reminder in my calendar a week
ahead of the event. I’ll put an equivalent reminder to dial it
back up a week before the break’s end, but that’s less urgent. Not
ideal, not particularly onerous.

Philip

On 14 August 2012 14:37, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I’d really like a way to program in rises/drops in the road in the future.
IE - I’m going to burning man this week, stop tracking my goals.

I’ve currently stopped using beeminder right now due to this or
another easy way to pause goals :confused:

-Jolly

From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com]
On Behalf Of Philip Hellyer
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2012 5:13 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: low-friction ad-hoc beeminding

The akrasia horizon is asymmetric. It’s a useful enforced delay
before dialling down a road, but can be a frustrating delay when
I’m keen to dial up the difficulty straight away. (It can be a
frustrating delay on the way down, too, but that’s the whole
point!)

The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon | Beeminder Blog suggests that some of us will
resist dialling it down because we’ll be convinced that we’ll have
our act together by the time a week passes. For me, the ‘only another
week’
energy burst only kicks in once I’ve adjusted the road and can see
the future slope change. During the week, I might discover that
it’s sustainable and want to maintain my (still current) slope.

It’s useful to have the option of a delay for slope increases,
because sometimes I want it steeper today, or maybe I’m in the mood
to force the pace from tomorrow, or the beginning of next month, or
whatever.
‘Right now’ isn’t always the best option.

I also have some goals that warrant a “hip-hugging” road; one that
encourages a minimum level of effort each week, and doesn’t let me
build up too much of a safety buffer. If I want to do X at least
twice a week, the fact that I managed it 5 times this week doesn’t
change my desire to do another 2 next week. These goals are
characterised by a weekly rate and an arbitrary end date, but not a
goal
total.

In terms of baskets of tasks, I might give the Reeves Must-Do
method a try-out. I have 3 other mechanisms active right now.

First is tracking the number of cycles I do on my task list, using
Mark Forster’s “final version” to process the list. This sounds
spiritually akin to Paul’s use of RTM, without points-per-task.

Second is a bundle of 3 aspirationaly-daily activities; doing any
one gives me a point, and I can get ahead or catch up by doing one
of each. By bundling these into a single goal, I escape the
problems inherent in beeminding a once-per-day-7-days-per-week
activity.
(Obviously, setting a slope of 21 per week would negate that
solution; my current slope is 10.5, and I anticipate growing it to
at most
17.5.)

Third is general time-tracking; must spend at least X hours per
week on this focus area. As much as I hate using time as a proxy
for progress, it’s relatively easy to measure, and is
semi-automated using
TagTime.

Philip

twitter.com/PhilipHellyer

On 14 August 2012 06:38, Melanie Reeves Wicklow
melzafish@gmail.com
wrote:

It probably is overkill for all but weight loss or similar goals.
Weight loss might even be fine with 3-4 days.

On Monday, August 13, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

Yeah, this may be the key to the power of the One Must-Do Task!
And if it works it may mean that a one-week akrasia horizon is overkill.

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Melanie Reeves Wicklow
melzafish@gmail.com wrote:

Hmm, I think I like that better than my “getrdone” list. After a
while, it didn’t really guide me. I’d just see what I had done
from the list when it was an emergency day or close to it and
record it, but the endlessly procrastinated tasks still weren’t
happening, only ones that had a deadline.
But with this, the previous day when you swear it’ll be easy to do
x y or z, you lock yourself in to that task. I’ve tried similar
things like only writing down the 3 most important tasks for the next
day.
But no system to force them done.

On Sunday, August 12, 2012, Daniel Reeves wrote:

I’m excited to try Paul Fenwick’s scheme below, but in the
meantime Bethany and I are trying something dirt simple that may
capture enough of the spirit of this to be valuable.

The idea is to pick one task that you Must Do the next day. You
have to write down the task the night before and it counts if you
actually do it the next day. You then commit to some number of
such tasks per week.

How to do that with Beeminder (the idea is to use the previous
day’s datapoint comment to commit to the next day’s task):

  1. Create a Do More goal like mustdo – d – beeminder 2. Add an
    initial datapoint like
    ^ 0 “tmw: file tps report”
    which commits you to filing your tps report tomorrow.
  2. The next day, if you filed your tps report, enter a new
    datapoint, along with a new task, like
    ^ 1 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report then
    ^ 0 “tmw: take over the world”
    or if you didn’t file your tps report but still need to (before
    you can take over the world) then like
    ^ 0 “tmw: ditto”
  3. Dial up your road to commit to however many tasks per week you
    want to commit to. (I’m starting with 3.5/week – one every other
    day.) 5. Rule: always enter your datapoint with a caret. You have
    to finish the day’s task – and specify tomorrow’s – by midnight.

If you want to get ambitious you can enter compound tasks (“file
tps report and clip toenails”) and still make the datapoints binary.

My datapoint yesterday read “tmw: describe this system on
akratics anonymous” so after I hit send I’ll give myself a 1 for
today and pick a task for tomorrow!

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Paul Fenwick
paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com
wrote:

Daniel’s just told me I need to join AA for a discussion going
on here, and I suspect this is it. :slight_smile:

So, in a nutshell, I’ve linked my TODO trakcer
(RememberTheMilk) to Beeminder. I get points for completing
tasks (joining AA just scored me one point), with things like work
tasks, and ‘hard’
tasks being worth much more.
(Points are configurable by list and/or tag). Of course,
Beeminder lets me set how many points I score each week before
I start losing money. :slight_smile:

I also have the problem of some tasks never getting done, so I
have a few ideas on how to encourage me:

  • Dynamic point values. Tasks are worth more points the longer
    they stick around, so eventually I’ll be encouraged to stop
    procrastinating and do the task I’ve been putting off.
  • As above, but tasks are worth less points the longer they
    stick around.
    This is dangerous, because eventually it becomes easier to
    scrap a task than complete it.
  • Staleness penalties. Tasks start generating negative points
    if they stick around too long, even if they don’t have a due date.
    Some lists (eg,


Sent from my iPhone http://beeminder.com


http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com