Sleepminder: dates of data points

It’s January 1. I get to bed slightly after midnight, 00:05, and sleep until 07:05. Next day, January 2, I sleep from 23:55-06:55.

How many hours did I sleep each day?
Beeminder’s answer: 14 hours on January 2.

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Normally I’d say that you should change your goal deadline so that it falls somewhere in the middle of when you’re usually asleep.

But there may be limitations with the Sleep as Android API that make that impossible. @bee will know the reasons why.

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Hmm… Unfortunately the deadline box is disabled. Another option would be that Beeminder registered the end point instead of the start time. Even when going to bed at 11pm, most of the sleep is done the next day.

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Sleep goals are a bit awkward because the sleep typically does happen across a day boundary. If you’re not creeping along on the exact edge of the road, then it doesn’t much matter how we decide to slice the day and where we count the data, but it does lead to weird stuff like this. If we used the end date for data entry it would almost always wind up with one sleep per calendar date, except in the case of napping.

I think I decided to use the date at the start reasoning that it was slightly more generous in the case where the user is riding close to the edge of the road. Though, only marginally, because if you go to bed before midnight with the goal in the red, then the goal will derail before the data is entered on the goal. Though once it is entered it might retroactively save you, though you’d still have to email support…

This is sounding rather convoluted as I try to describe it, eh?

I was also going to claim that “most sleep tracking apps” refer to your sleep as happening yesterday, e.g. I’m currently using my pebble for sleep tracking, so I opened up the app expecting to see it tell me that I slept ~7 hours “yesterday”, but I was wrong. They are refering to my sleep “today”. So maybe I’m not following any conventions there?

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