I do have two goals with a deadline set at 12:00 and 13:00 that are about making myself look presentable before lunch and getting some (not all) work done in the morning before 13:00.
Those make no sense to do in advance and they are bright red almost all the time.
Most of my goals are like that - Iâm not sure what the problem with that is. How should they be?
I have goals like this, tooâ/slick (akin to @phiâs look presentable goal) and /timeboxing (plan my day in the morning). These goals are quite regularly red the day before it makes any sense to do them (that is, Iâve already planned my day and made myself presentable, and yet after ~9:30am the goals are red for the rest of the day).
The point is that âdue in less than 24 hoursâ and âdue todayâ are, for some of us, often two different things, and weâd really like to be able to easily see the second as well as the first.
Also, when you have many different deadlines (think: deadline waterfall), as things currently stand thereâs no way to see what exactly is going on with your day at a glance. Of course, you can figure it out, but you have to stare to figure it out, not glance. And when moneyâs on the line and the day is hectic, being able to take things in at a glance becomes quite important.
I think there are three factors that feed into a need for this feature. If none of these are true for you, you arenât likely to see a need for this feature. But for those of us who these do apply to, something like this would be incredibly useful.
If none of these things apply to you, itâs pretty simple to keep what you need to do today in your head, and the current UI is more than sufficient to communicate what you need to know.
If, however, these conditions do apply to you, youâre going to have a hard time keeping every goal due today and its respective deadline in your head, and the current UI is pretty handicapped in its ability to communicate that to you quickly. In the end, that means Beeminderâs threat becomes fuzzy, preventing it from having the influence it should on your life.
My goal is that every time I derail itâs due to a conscious calculation. Missing a deadline because itâs unclear to me whatâs due when is not a conscious calculation. Itâs not a valuable way to derail, so it should be minimized.
Doesnât the list widget do that?
All these things apply to me, and I donât need to keep it in my head because the list widget shows them.
But - it would be great if the list widget could show times instead of or in addition to the amount of time until the deadline (that is, epoch rather than interval).
Frankly, no. At a glance you can see:
Beyond that, you have to read to find out the following things, which I think @phi and I would prefer be communicated in a more visual way:
Also, regarding number of goals, I currently have 40+ goals. It looks like you may have ~8? Of course, I canât count the number of private goals you haveâŚ
I have 63 now. Check out those pics I posted up there with the list widgets⌠you can see I have a lot.
seconding everything narthurâs saying. A simple vertical line with deadlines for goals marked by goal names linked to the full goal page, and each day and the akrasia horizon of 1 week clearly marked on the vertical line, would be a pretty great place to start, I think.
As we get fancy, imagine watching the goals transition and move as data gets entered, and imagine the whole line slowly moving upwards, maybe even at half transparency for anything in the past, quickly fading to invisibleâŚ
I donât have a list widget. Donât get me started on the app. The iOS app⌠leaves much to be desired. Itâs definitely the worst app on my phone (and iPad) and itâs tough to even find an app that is buggier than that in the app store. The widget is next to useless, there is no list widget, it crashes all the time, it looks completely stupid on an iPad, it offers very limited functionality compared to the website. The time tracker is still unreliable. Sorry for the harsh words but itâs been months. All these are known issues.
If itâs so hard to fix it then scrap it and make the website work better on mobile.
OK you got me started 
A few years ago, I was working on hacking up something like what @phi is describing with the Beeminder API and D3. I kind of dropped it when I learned about cross domain scripting restrictions and realized I needed to code a backend. (I was jumping into D3 without having properly learned JS.) Itâs sitting around somewhere.
The purpose of my thing was more specific, though. Back then I had several time input goals, and I wanted to have a dashboard that could warn me before things saturated. I was planning on visualizing the time amounts due for each goal, and due for all timey of goals of similar units on the timeline as well.
Nothing mentioned in this thread did that kind of calculation for me, and my schedule at the time was not amenable to arranging the goals in a waterfall.
This is an interesting way of constructing goals. I have gotten used to thinking about a red goal as mandatory for today. Red doesnât necessarily mean not okay, it just indicates a priority class.
If I understand @phi correctly, you could have a goal you only really want to begin worrying about at a certain time.
There is a general related question that comes up for me: âGiven multiple commitments, including Beeminder goals and things not in Beeminder, when should I start doing any particular thing?â And âWhen is my last chance to get started on this before moving on to something else I can do?â
This would require more abstractions than Beeminder
Iâve been thinking about getting back into D3 and vis. If I werenât in the middle of a job/internship search right now, I would be happy to dig up my old code and prototype an unofficial UI for this. I also have promised to contribute a blog post toward the end of the summer, so after I do that, I can give it a shot if folks are still interested.
As a side note, I think the reminder side of the goals problem-space that Beeminder is tackling is much harder than the commitment side. I think thatâs because itâs kind of edging into the problem space of Planning. There are certain ways of using Beeminder (like Waterfall, or @maryâs use Beeminder for everything) that let you avoid some of the problems, but there are so many different combinations of goals that have a high demand for planning and management.
Iâd love to see it!