I have found a very very weird way to use Beeminder as a todo list, and it involves setting a do less goal with a cap of five todos.
My do less goal means that if at any given time I have more than five todos due by the end of the day, I derail on the goal and get charged. So I can reduce the number of todos due by completing them and deleting the datapoints. I can also add datapoints for the future for todos due at later dates but not due today.
Why five? Because the iOS app only shows 5 datapoints at a time
I acknowledge this is pretty brittle and not a Beeminder way to do things because anytime this derails requires a pretty annoying graph fix to get it back to speed.
However, it means I donât need a separate todo app, and having my todos in Beeminder is worth the weirdness jank of hacking Beeminder into being my todo list, as the one must do task a day version never worked well for me.
Advantages: My todos are in beeminder, and I can schedule todos to be due in the future. Additionally, having a backlog hurts me today AND in the future, so Iâm highly incentivized to complete past todos.
Disadvantages: Any derail requires a graph fix, so I am HIGHLY motivated not to derail.
Ooh, I like it! It doesnât actually seem terribly hacky to me, just clever. Youâre graphing undone tasks and committing to keeping them under some threshold. Whatâs so bad about the post-derail state? Too much buffer? Can you not ratchet it?
I hadnât honestly thought about that, but I had the post derail buffer too high, and fixing that made for one ugly graph compared to the âyou always have 5 tasks of bufferâ mentality.
Right, 0 days of buffer if derail, ratchet if needed. That would work well. The only other quirk is that this doesnât exactly line up with âx tasks needed by x dateâ, since 1 task of buffer and 2 tasks of buffer acts weirdly, but honestly, this works well - enough.
Edit: just remembered, derails are ugly because your graph when derailing gets set to a value like six. Hence the weirdness in using Beeminder like this.
Thanks for sharing your system. I had the thought of what it might look like to add another datapoint upon completing a task by setting say -1 as the value and with a DONE Task xyz as the comment instead of deleting done items.
For anyone else stumbling across this, more specifically the ios app shows the ârecent datapointsâ of which there are a maximum of five. These are the most recently touched datapoints and may not be the most recent from a date or daystamp viewpoint.
