Setting up multiple data sources for one goal?

Newbee
1

I signed up for Beeminder yesterday, with a fairly aggressive Japanese-study/exposure goal.

Is it possible to integrate a single beeminder goal with multiple services? Ideally, I want to enter data manually, but automatically get data for specific anki decks (I installed Announcing Beeminder for Anki 's tool), skritter (Japanese only, despite also having it for Chinese), and possibly duolingo (Japanese only, despite mainly using it for other languages).

I’ve read Multiple input sources for more frictionless tracking , but it’s still not obvious to me how to properly set up extra data sources on an existing goal.

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If I were to set this up, I would probably set this up with one goal for each datasource, and then use IFTTT for a megagoal that combines them all… but really, I am not sure what benefit I get out of having the megagoal. Letting various types of exercise be fungible?

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That was my first idea as well. One could even do with two fewer goals than that:

  1. Set up megagoal with automatic Beeminder integration for one source, say Duolingo.
  2. Use Anki plugin to send data points to megagoal (should work, so no extra Anki goal needed).
  3. Set up auto-integration goals for the remaining sources and IFFT the data points to the megagoal.

In the Duolingo/Skritter/Anki case that’s two goals total.

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I don’t particularly want to have a specific goal for, say, Duolingo - Duolingo Japanese is probably the weakest of the courses I have golden owls on. I’d just like to eliminate the grind of having to manually enter any review I happen to do on Duolingo to my overall goal. I suppose I could set an absurdly low goal of a minute/week, crank out an hour on Duolingo so it can’t derail in the next year, etc, but it feels like a bit of a hack. :slight_smile:

The ‘megagoal’ is my primary goal: you could view this as an intended to be year-long experiment in the principle of putting a set amount of time into studying (and exposure to) a language. I care about putting in at least 900 hours; I don’t care how much of it is with any particular service Beeminder has an integration for. :slight_smile:

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Ah, I see. If you primarily care about total time, I would set up a goal for total time.

Would you be assuming some sort of set conversion rate between Duolingo XP and minutes? In my experience, I would be better off just setting a timer in the Beeminder app before starting Duolingo practice.

Do you use Android or iOS primarily? On Android, you could set up a category for Japanese study. It can add up Duolingo minutes on the web and mobile, and any other applications on desktop, web, and mobile. I use it for things like this all the time.

(On iOS, third party applications can’t get access to that type of information, even with permission from the user.)

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My goal is set up for total time. I use Android on my phone.

I didn’t realize the Duolingo integration was only in terms of XP. Timing it is significantly more useful.

I’ll look into setting up a category for Japanese study - that sounds almost exactly like what I want, aside from the study I do on (Linux) computers. Thank you.

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Cool. I’d definitely set up a megagoal in Beeminder with the ‘real’ difficulty, and each of the methods as separate minigoals with easily achievable slopes. As others have described, you can use IFTTT or Zapier to update the megagoal when the minigoals get a datapoint.

Remember to be easy on yourself to start with. Commit to a volume of work that you can achieve without too much effort, and increase it from there.

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How do you do this?