# Track Days Where You Reach Your Step Goal

**URL:** <https://forum.beeminder.com/t/track-days-where-you-reach-your-step-goal/573>\
**Category:** Akrasia\
**Created:** [March 8, 2015, 1:25pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/track-days-where-you-reach-your-step-goal/573 "2015-03-08T13:25:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![philip](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/philip/32/1505_2.png) [@philip](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/philip)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2015, 1:54pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/track-days-where-you-reach-your-step-goal/573/7 "2015-03-08T13:54:28Z")

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This is measuring two different things:

1. minding the number of steps
2. minding the number of ‘adequate’ days

For #1, I think we’re all in violent agreement that beeminding the average is superior to many other methods. It is ridiculously frustrating when your pedometer hit 9900 steps and it’s counted for nothing by our [productivity competitors](http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors).

For #2, it’s more complicated. Arguably any **binary** goal is tracking days of effort above a not-aways-well-defined threshold.

I like @dreev’s suggestion of setting an [autoratchet](http://blog.beeminder.com/glossary/#autoratchet) threshold to force some effort every N days. But that approach also requires that the daily minimum and the weekly minimum are the **same** rate. (Not strictly true, but sufficiently so for the purposes of discussion)

Here’s a great example from @aspiers about separating a daily minimum (threshold-driven!) goal from an overall goal. He’ll still need two Beeminder goals to achieve that, but at least now he can automate it using an IFTTT recipe like @tomjen’s…

> [@Triangular beeminding for tracking alcohol consumption](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/triangular-beeminding-for-tracking-alcohol-consumption/543/40):
>
> - practice at least 5 minutes of music every day without exception (this is crucial for forming a daily habit)
> - average X hours of music practice per week, where ideally X \>= 6 but should be dial-able over the months depending on other time commitments (this is crucial for longer-term progress, since 5 minutes a day will hardly get me anywhere)

In short. we agree that if it’s **steps** (or equivalent) that we’re beeminding, then minding the raw count is the right approach. That’s true regardless of autoratchet or aggregation settings. But sometimes you also want to count the **days** on which you accomplish ‘enough’ toward your goal, in the same spirit as a [must-do](http://blog.beeminder.com/mustdo) or a [user-visible improvement](http://blog.beeminder.com/uvi)…

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