Nifty trick for "days I did this other goal" goals

Akrasia
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I find that a few of my goals come in multiples.

A good example is weight loss. I have a weight_loss goal, which is about as bog-standard as a goal comes on Beeminder. Twice, on my weight loss goal, I hit a good milestone, went out to eat, was scared of weighing in the next day, and then ended up waiting 2 weeks to weigh in, eating up my safety margin from my last “good” datapoint. Ugh.

I realized I needed a “weighed in days” goal. This goal counts the number of days I weigh in. I was able to quite easily rig this up with IFTTT and custom goals (requires a premium plan…)

I made a new IFTTT recipe. If a datapoint is added to weight_loss, add a datapoint of 1 to weigh_days. Then, go into weigh_days, turn it into a custom goal, and set the aggregation to “binary”. This means that no matter how many times I weigh in in one day, the day will have a value of 1 if I add data, and a value of 0 if I do not–and it’s all completely automatic!

I’ve been doing this for over a month now, and it’s really helped me out.

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Oh, neat! I didn’t know about the binary type goal until I read this post. (I’m sure it’s mentioned somewhere else, just haven’t run into it.)

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There is a forum post which documents all the different aggregation types.
I do agree that it’s hard to casually come across.

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Thanks. Maybe it’s time to put together a Beeminder Power Users reference post that can be wikified, similar to the Newbees guide that’s here on the forums. Should I get this started?

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Here’s an example of an issue that can occur if you do not have the aggregation set to Binary: https://www.beeminder.com/gudamor/goals/wake

The above goal uses a similar IFTTT recipe, but on the 22nd when I derailed on my Weight goal there was a ‘recommitted’ data point created. This caused IFTTT trigger again, so that day ‘weigh-ins’ increased by 2 even though I only weighed myself once.

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Another issue with not using binary with the “recipe” is that you can weigh
yourself a bunch of times one day and not have to weigh in for a while!

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I’ve so far avoided that one by not thinking about it :smiley:

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beeminder paradox:
there are 500 different settings and 99% of new users are hopelessly overwhelmed/annoyed and quit
the 1% who persist and understand the madness find more clever loopholes and ask for new settings to close them

(no negativity meant here - just something i’ve noticed that amuses me that this post reminded me of :slight_smile: )

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“Nonzero data point added for this goal” (or the scarier “Data point in range”) sounds like a good someday addition to IFTTT triggers, especially when Beeminding logging for other Beeminder goals. The recommitted data point still messes up non-binary datapoint counts. And I bet there are some other use cases.

(Not sure if Beeminder is at the max number of trigger types already, though–there are six right now and they’re all pretty useful.)

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Note that mirroring the actual datapoint value into a binary goal would have the effect of dealing appropriately with zero datapoints. Not useful for counting the total number of non-zero datapoints added, of course, but should work for “days I did this other goal”

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Feature Request: single datasource, multiple goals

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Doesn’t “pessimistic presumption” sort of prevent this? I don’t know if you can turn it on for weight loss goals, but for do less goals, if you turn on pessimistic presumptions, then a dummy pessimistic data point gets added if you don’t add any data point that day.

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@spookane I have only ever needed this on “do more” goals.

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@olimay, you will be our new best friend if you do this! It may also serve as a nice guide for us as “things to improve so they don’t need to be explained in a power users’ guide”. (:

(Also laughing out loud at @chelsea’s Beeminder paradox. The best of both worlds is possible and we will get there! Cf Rearranging settings )

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If you are doing this today, use the nonzero aggregation.

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