So according to my beeminder yesterday I practiced guitar for 0.167 hours. How much is that? Is it a lot? Is it just a little bit? It’s hard to tell, we’re not used to measuring time in fractions of an hour (with few exceptions - 0.5h, 0.25h).
The timerdroid GUI knows about hours, minutes, and seconds — the units that we’ve been habitually using for ages. How about we make all the parts of the system time-aware? The user could mark a goal as time-related, and use time units in the YBR slope (say 1h/week), and in data points (my 0.167 units from yesterday could be written as 10:02).
Note that you can already enter data points using syntax like 0:10:02, and it will automatically convert to 0.167. But I agree it would be nice if goals marked as time goals also displayed data points using that syntax. This is a feature I requested a long time ago: https://beeminder.uservoice.com/forums/3011-general/suggestions/3448592-have-an-option-to-specify-time-tracking-goals-f There has been talk of migrating uservoice suggestions to this forum somehow, but I am not sure what the status is on that. For now, I think the idea is that anyone who also wants this feature should click the “heart” icon on this post.
I started out tracking minutes - I figured that is what made the most sense - but timerdroid insist that your time goal must be tracked in hours if you use the timer function in it, so eventually I changed my goals to use that.
Personally I kinda like your solution but would also love it if one could just track things in minutes - it just makes more sense to say I spend 22 minutes yesterday on goal x than 0.423 (or whatever) hours.
Yeah, I track my productive time in hours to integrate with RescueTime, but it gets confusing when I’m scrambling on eep days – if I knew how many minutes I had left to do, I’d know what time I absolutely had to start working in order to hit my goal. As it is, when I have 0.2 hours to do and 20 minutes left to do it in, having to reach for a calculator just increases my unproductive panic.
It’s one of those “if I built up a proper buffer, this wouldn’t be a problem” things, but, well, if I operated with that kind of buffer normally, I wouldn’t find beeminder so valuable…
This is exactly what I was looking for. It would be great to be able to adjust the timer output. I had thought that I used “minutes” originally, but looking back, it only has you type in the units. You don’t actually set anything.
Right now, I’m going to be going the round-a-bout way of using a pomodoro timer and just manually typing it, but as we all know, the manual entries are just one more barrier to entry in a system where we need to minimize them!