I would like to use Beeminder to help with a health-related goal (“do more”).
From past experience, I know that when the relative humidity exceeds 90% or a certain temperature as reported by NOAA, I should expect to have great difficulty with the goal.
NOAA provides a 7-day forecast but does not forecast the relative humidity more than 72 hours in advance.
What would be the best way to use Beeminder for the goal? I don’t want to frequently bug support.
Set it at a very conservative rate on a monthly basis or start with a lot of buffer? The former, if you average what you think you’ll do between high humidity and low humidity dates (then subtract a bit) should leave you with plenty of buffer.
Something I’ve done to great success with things like this is to commit to do a microscopic amount of a thing, regardless of the circumstances.
For instance, commit to do at least one pushup. Even if I overdid it the day before, or had a cold, or had an emergency work thing come up, the number of things that stop me from doing one pushup is different than what would stop me from doing… 50 or something. Another example, for reading for instance, would be something like “read at least one page”. The goal would basically be “every day, put 1 in if I did at least X, and 0 if I did not.”
To make sure I don’t always just read one page, or do only one pushup, I usually have another goal that tracks the total count, and I try not to even get close to the edge of that goal.
It may help you here too.
There are a few goals like this that I’ve used disjunctive goal-satisfaction criteria on (“either x or y” for +1).
You could make a goal that’s “Either do this health thing OR put up with a 90% humidity day” and then just add something in the comments so they can be teased apart in your data. (You could even have something like IFTTT or Zapier send the +1 datapoint on days when the humidity is going to be above 90%.)
You could also make this kind of either/or goal and have an alternate task to perform on a 90% humidity day like “Either do this health thing OR if it’s 90%+ humidity, do this other health task that’s especially good for me in high humidity”.
Just a thought!
Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ve decided to start with a goal at the lower-end of things and see how things go.
I didn’t want to get into specifics at first because I know that a lot of health conditions can be affected by humidity and I want future visitors to this thread to get ideas for themselves too.
In my case, I’m tracking sleep time using the Beeminder integration with Sleep as Android. I hope I don’t need to start tracking things manually; I’m sure there’s a scholarly article somewhere that talks about how making the user of a software application do some work each day is extremely bad compared to doing no work at all.