I would also like some categorisation or organisation system. Even
something light weight would do. The below the fold, above the fold stuff
is okay. But it’s a very blunt tool.
I have three major contexts: personal, open source, and work. And often I
only care about one context at a particular point in time. (Though logging
on in the morning to see what is red, yellow, etc, gives me a good idea of
what I need to work on during the day.)
But I also imagine that it would be useful to add more than one category to
a goal. For example, within those contexts, I have binary success goals (1
or 0 for the day) and time based goals.
So the ability to perhaps tag goals would be useful, and then an easy way
to filter or sort or group based on tag. Perhaps something like OS X’s
smart search (in Mail.app, Finder.app, any lots of other places) so you
could create a smart search for "all goals tagged with ‘personal’ and
‘time’ and under seven days safety buffer’ and then save that as “Priority
(Personal)” or whatever, and have that saved search come up in a list on
the dashboard. And then you can just flip between searches. Could even do
something like that with JS on the client side.
Anyway, just spitballin here. But yes, “one big inbox” can be cumbersome.
(I track over 30 goals!)
On 25 September 2013 17:19, Rob Felty robfelty@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for the tip Katherine! I didn’t know about that feature. And now
that I have played with it, I think I like the beeminder defaults better!
Thanks for knowing what I actually wanted Danny!On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Katherine Baxter <
baxter.katherine@gmail.com> wrote:For your weight graph, set vmin to 0 in the advanced options.
On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Rob Felty robfelty@gmail.com wrote:
I think that interactive graphs would solve the graph readability
problem. I
personally would also like the ability to set the y-axis on the graph.
If
you look at my weight graph, it looks like I have made some big
changes, but
if you made the y-axis start at 0, it would look very flat (which is
closer
to the truth in my opinion)Rob
On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Reto Stamm reto@retostamm.com wrote:
I think I agree with each of these points, really. Especially the
cluttered inbox state. I made a new account just for that, and I start
cluttering it up again. It seems that goals are not forever.I have moved daily habits to lift.d, which has a nice checklist
interface,
and community cheering, which was somewhat nice. Since there’s no long
term
tracking, I’ve done that for all of a week, then stopped. What I plan
on
doing is to add lift.do to Beeminder - it has a Ruby gem that pulls
from it,
and a csv interface also. The lift.do guys were friendly but not very
helpful when I chatted with them.
I plan to add a “% of habits done/day” tracker (or # of habits), so I
can
set up a “do more” goal for these as a whole thing.The “Urgent, extremely demanding project” is a very real thing. Getting
back into the groove afterwards is hard, too.Graph readability with many datapoints may be improved if it only shows
the next week and the last month or so. But then it of course looks
less
impressive.Reto
On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Brian Fabian Crain <crainbf@gmail.com
wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted
to
share some of my thoughts on it.First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my
life
and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it
in Nick
Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions
with the
Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding
and I
feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other
company I can
think of right now.Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from
Beeminder. I’ll describe the reasons why.Akrasia Horizon
In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and
I
derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating
about
them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important
and more
urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to
anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very
good at
that.I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat
resentful
about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of
Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not
really
aligned with my bouts of laziness.Graphs
Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very
motivating.
But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data
points
the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some
satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped
working
for me as a motivational tool.Clutter
I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it
I
was probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became
difficult
as they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some were
things
I wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do occasionally
anyway and
just wanted logged somewhere. Some were automatically pulled from
other
applications. Over time, this just started to feel very confusing and
I
didn’t like that the only effective organization to this was how many
days I
had left until derailment.Behavioral/Project Alignment
Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has
been
that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals
or with
the structure of my day.One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of
goals.
e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been
able
to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I
could
have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear
overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder
feels
like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,
relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined
limbo-state.
It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your
attention
when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking
A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I
derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on
these
derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking
service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder
has.Going Forward
I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic
activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author,
rating
and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can
export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are
a few
more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit
integration as it is frictionless.But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some
of
the habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy,
untameable octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something
else to
give me structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that
would
be Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and
that
a lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great
and I
really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very
successful
future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder
somehow.But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful
for
Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from
the
knowledgeable folks of this list.Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?
Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have
avoided
this?Cheers,
Brian–
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