Narthur's Beeminder Journal

[narthur]

I was inspired by Dreev’s brainstorming in the New Year’s Resolutions thread to try to figure out how to beemind keeping in touch with friends.

The idea in the thread was to use neglect minding:

@dreev

Ah, good question! That’s my term for one of the metrics that @galtsubery’s beemind.me has: the sum of the ages of a set of to-dos or messages or whatever else you need to deal with. The main thing I’m neglect-minding these days is my Pocket queue.

I decided not to use neglect-minding directly since:

1. I don’t like do-less goals.
2. Using beemind.me to do it seemed like I could just edit the Trello card to avoid a derail instead of actually contacting someone.

So I decided to flip it on its head:

1. Keep track of the date of last contact for each person.
2. Assign a target interval for each contact.
3. Calculate a priority metric for each contact by subtracting the current interval from the target interval.
4. Assign point values for Text, Email, IRL, and Phone contacts by adding MAX(Priority, 0) to a base value for each type of interaction.
5. Beemind earning these points using a standard do-more Beeminder goal.

I’m using AirTable to keep track:

Couple more notes:

1. I’m using weeks as my unit of measure for Target and Current intervals.
2. I’m sorting first by priority descending, second by target ascending.
3. Interaction point values are being coerced to integers.
4. Currently, if there is no date of Last Contact, the Current interval is assumed to be the same as the Target interval. This seems good enough for now.