Salami goals

1

I have a time-based “do more” goal which I’m intensely akratic about, and I set myself a low weekly target of an hour a week to start with. As a result I found myself doing just the minimum 9 minutes. That’s too small a slice of time to get much useful done on this goal, so I’m not doing myself any favours here.

I could just up the time – and in fact I will – but I do want to start slow (especially because I have a bunch of other goals that I’ve also started recently).

I would like to stick to mostly time-based tracking because it’s the easiest thing to measure, and as long as I do a reasonable amount of time, that usually corresponds to real progress. But right now, I’m slicing up the time too thin.

How do other people deal with that? I thought about maybe an aggday that counts for nothing unless it’s more than half an hour, for example (though I don’t see one in the beeminder docs)?

5 Likes
2

There isn’t an aggday that takes a parameter like that yet but depending upon your level of technical tomfoolery it can be done in a few ways.

One option would be to beemind “number of quarterhours” or “number of halfhours”.

Another would be to use IFTTT and their advanced filters. You’d set up one goal that you just put time into, and another goal that you’d mirror filtered datapoints into, with the real pledge and rate and stuff like that. There’s some semi-instructions here: https://forum.beeminder.com/t/bed-time-with-ifttt/4738 and https://forum.beeminder.com/t/triathalon-training-goal/3814/12

Another would be to use the API and set up a filter that way.

4 Likes
3

I’ve been experimenting when this lately. It seems to solve the issue fairly well.

4

Can you make the semi-instructions just an idea less semi? What are IFTTT’s advanced filters?
When I go to https://platform.ifttt.com and click on “Try now” all I’m getting is this:

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Which is a form I have filled out in the past and the IFTTT people have simply ignored it.
Did I mention how much most customer support teams suck?

5

There were pretty good instructions on the forum, but it appears IFTTT has pulled the free Typescript filtering into their paid offerings.

6

this sucks! I had a very similar idea that I wanted to implement in beegment. Linking goals together with filters. So I got excited seeing this was already a thing. And then bummed again learning it’s no longer.