I get figure out how to set my first goal. I really did RTFM, i.e. the guide for newbies, at least as much of it as I thought I needed to get started. I have a goal picked, which is to do a certain thing every day for the next 7 days. But when I try to set that up I am stymied. I understand that there are different kinds of goals – do, don’t do, etc., and I expected to get a menu early on that let me choose my goal type, and the frequency as daily, etc., and to enter a name for the goal. But when I go to the New Goal page, the first topic on the page is PUSH FROM and I’m asked to “select which goal should send data to your new meta goal.” What is “pushing from” ? What is a meta goal? (I even entered “meta goal” in the search box, and got a lot of hits, but none that looked like definitions or explanations.). Do I have to set a meta goal before I set a goal? Or is my simple planned goal for this week a “meta goal”? There’s nothing meta about it, but if it will make the system happy I will call it a meta goal. But where do I set it up as a metagoal?
The New Goal page does not seem like it is set up for people whose Beeminder account is currently a blank slate. It asks me to choose a goal from a dropdown menu, but the menu does not contain a list of options – it is blank except for an instruction at the top to “Select a Goal.” (I have created an account and given a credit card number, just have not set up my first goal, except the one that Beeminder generates automatically, which is to set up a goal of my choosing within a week of signing up.)
Jeez. Can one of you tell me how to START? Or maybe you can link me instructions that apply to people who are starting a brand new account.
By the way, very happy to have finally signed up for Beeminder, which I have known about for several years. Hello everybody.
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Hi @powisty! It sounds like you’ve already gone through the first step, “how will you track your progress”, and selected to use the Metaminder integration which can only be a Do More type goal. That means on the “how will you track your progress” section, you skipped the “add progress manually to Beeminder” button and clicked the Beeminder icon under “connect to a service to have your progress sync automatically”.
You want to go back to that previous step (there’s an arrow at the top left you can click on) and choose the option to manually track your progress – or, if you did want data to be added automatically, pick the right icon for the integration you want to use.
There’s a step-by-step guide in the help docs for Do More goals, which you might find handy to follow (it has screenshots for every step, so it’ll help you know what you’re looking for).
We’d love to understand this a bit more – do you remember at all why you chose the Beeminder icon from the “connect a service to have your progress sync automatically” section? I think sometimes people pick that thinking, “well, I want to add data via the Beeminder app” – was it perhaps something like that?
As you’ve guessed, people would want to use that option only if they already have Beeminder goals. What it does is push data from one Beeminder goal from another, e.g. someone can have things set up so each time they weighs themselves on their Withings scales and it syncs up to their Beeminder goal, a +1 gets added to their Metaminder goal. It’s useful in situations where someone doesn’t just want to do a certain amount of something on average, but wants to do that thing every day, for example: one goal can track that they’re doing that thing enough (or gaining enough weight), while the other tracks that they’re checking in each day; they can derail on one and not the other, if they for example do +100 in a single day, and then don’t do anything for a few days.
You can’t use a Metaminder goal if you don’t have any other goals yet, but hopefully that makes it a bit clearer what it’s all about!
Does all this help at all, or are you still feeling confused?
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There is also some bug around Beeminder’s handling of ‘sessions’ and local storage in the browser, if I recall correctly. This issue the new user described sounds to me it suffered from that as well.
I think it was that the ‘new goal wizard’ marks which steps have been completed and merely returning to the initial page to start over does not reset this state and so new goal creation can be tripped up. A workout would be to open a new browser window and another would be to log out then back in.
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Or to simply press the button to go back a step, as I described, of course. 
Which is probably the most convenient.
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"On the “how will you track your progress” section, you skipped the “add progress manually to Beeminder” button and clicked the Beeminder icon under “connect to a service to have your progress sync automatically”.
Yeah, you nailed it. But I didn’t exactly skip the “add progress manually,” just didn’t really grasp the difference between that and clicking on Beeminder in the “sync automatically” section. So I started over with setting a new goal, this time clicked “add progress manually,” and everything’s fine and I’m all set. Thank you!
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