Beeminder Forum

Request: Derailment info machine

Tech
#1

Hello everyone,

I would be very interested in a “derailment info machine”. I do not know if some users have this or have figured out a way to do something similar.

I would like to be able to see stats on my derailments like:

  • x days since last derailment on each goal / all goals
  • record number of days without derailments on each goal / all goals
  • total amount of money paid on each goal / all goals
  • how many times you have derailed on each goal / all goals
  • be able to know if you are moving towards derailments or away from them (looking at the mean from all the datapoints of all goals combined)

I know I would be able to do something similar by looking at the data from payments but that would have to be a constant manual thing, rather than an automatic one.

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#2

I have done a good amount of work on “be able to know if you are moving towards derailments or away from them (looking at the mean from all the datapoints of all goals combined”. It is also a desire of mine.

At first, it seems simple. Then you realize future roads may be really, really complicated. I had an epiphany and started tracking safetydays as the target metric here, actually, to know if I am getting closer or further from a derailment.

Then you realize some people may have goal deadlines all throughout the day, so when you think “I’ll do this at the start of the day, and at the end of the day, and compare to see if I am on track or not”, you may need to split into lots of different pieces, based on each goal deadline!

Would you be interested in checking this information as you are entering data, or would “How you did each day last week” be an OK starting point? (I am more interested in “Am I generally doing enough” rather than “WHAT SHOULD I DO RIGHT NOW?!”) My gut feel is that you should be able to see this per goal, but also aggregated over all your goals, maybe even with some outlier detection.

“In the past week, you have made enough progress in all of your goals except for these two: foo, and bar. You didn’t make any progress on bar! You made three weeks of progress in baz!” (along with some data tables, with fancy gradient highlighting…)

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#3

Me too. I don’t really know what to answer to your question because I do not understand what this

“Then you realize some people may have goal deadlines all throughout the day, so when you think “I’ll do this at the start of the day, and at the end of the day, and compare to see if I am on track or not”, you may need to split into lots of different pieces, based on each goal deadline!”

has to do with my proposition. I mean, yes code-wise; not on a practical sense. I do not care about which hour is the derailment now, but rather if a derailment has happened in the past.

Let me rephrase it. I would like to know:

  • I am going in the right direction in general terms? I am doing enough?
  • When was the last time I derailed on x / on all goals? I don’t think that, code-wise, this might be difficult to do. I am imagining those big signs that companies have of “3 days since last security issue” or whatever and think about something similar. It would be motivating for me to see something similar, so I stop losing money and I accomplish more of my goals. -> maybe setting a 0$ goal and track derailments is an idea, but don’t have the 32$ plan, and I wouldn’t pay just for that.
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#4

I do not think it would be tricky to get “when was the last time I derailed per goal or on any goal”.

How often do you think you’d want to check this to be useful for you? Daily? Every few days? Weekly?

#5

Couldn’t you use the “RECOMMITTED” comments to figure that out?

#6

I think there’s many ways to get this information. You could search your email, look for RECOMMITTED datapoints, look at payment history…

You could look at just days since derails, or “average dollars per month”, or a running average of derails, or or or :slight_smile:

In my experience, deciding which metrics are useful is just as important as getting the information, and that’s where I’m going with the questions. I apologize if I’m being too roundabout!

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#7

No worries! I misread your post I replied to. Carry on. :sweat_smile:

#8

Maybe daily, maybe as a weekly review check.

Since there is no automatic source of information on derails I would say that whatever metric is easier to extract information from. And maybe it is possible to build up from there?

#9

You could use a Zapier zap to parse Beeminder derailment emails that come in and have it throw the info about the date, goal, and size of the derailment into a Google spreadsheet (or you could just have it throw the date and subject into the spreadsheet and parse it using the spreadsheet) and then you could do any analysis of the data that you’d like!

I know you’re thinking, "Does she always recommend either an IFTTT or a Zapier solution? Why yes… yes I do. And the only tool in my toolbox is duct tape.

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