Just for fun, I’m playing around with using 3x5 index cards to simulate of Beeminder type tracking of tasks. So I wanted to hack an easy-ish way to keep track of slope progress like beeminder.
For example, suppose you want to do something,. ON AVERAGE, 4 times a week. Wish I do is, each day I complete a task, that counts as 7 points. Each day that passes by, subtract 4 points.
So suppose the first day is Sunday, which starts with a total of zero, I do all 4 tasks. Then that counts as 4 * 7=28 points. Then one can clearly see that the next beemergency would be in 28/4=7 days. But suppose I do 2 more on Wed? That’s 3 days later, so the new total would be 28 - 3 * 4 + 2 * 7 = 30. Any day that starts with a total < 4 is a beemergency.
On the other hand, if you want to do 30 min per week, it’s easiest to just round to the nearest multiple of 7, so 28 min per week. Then your rate is 4 min/day. Each 1 minute is counted as “1 point”, and each day you subtract 4 from the running total. For 60 minutes per week (56 minutes), one could subtract 8 for each day.
I know this isn’t rocket science, but I just thought it was fun to figure this out, how to do this without fractions. Of course, the main takeaway from all this is that beeminder appeals to nerds.
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