Long story short beeminder only works for me if I absolutely cannot cheat. Russian Practice is the only goal I still have going, because if I don’t complete a lesson in Duolingo, I will be charged.
I want to make the same thing for a biweekly workout goal. I thought about using IFTTT to force me to go to the gyms location, but it’s right across the street and I think my drive to work might trigger that.
Any other ways I can do this?
Tie the goal to a Twitter account where you post pictures of yourself at the gym, holding something that indicates the date? Not foolproof, but has an element of public accountability.
Tying it to Twitter can work pretty brilliantly. For example, we’re going on 6 years of our User-Visible Improvements goal. Deciding what counts as a UVI is pretty fuzzy but having to tweet each one prevents us from ever getting too weaselly about it.
I’d also try the IFTTT trigger – it might be smart enough to not count it unless you’re at the gym for long enough, or you may be able to set the radius tight enough.
Would love to hear how this goes!
Two thoughts:
Zapier may have different radius-detection options than IFTTT
I use Swarm to manually check in at the gym, verified by geolocation, but not automagically detected by geofencing
I’ve tried out the IFTTT geolocation trigger just to message my team on Skype that i’m out of the office, and I wouldn’t trust it for adding data on Beeminder as it may trigger multiple times if you’re near the building
Swarm + Twitter sounds like a good solution!