I just made my first beeminder goal to brush teeth twice daily. One issue is I tend not to record that I brush my teeth until later in the morning when I get on my PC. Does anyone have an idea for how I could easily record that I brushed my teeth in the evening before bed? The dream would be a button next to the bathroom sink that I could push that would send the info to beeminder.
Peter
Congrats! I also just recently downloaded beeminder, and set up teeth brushing as my first goal.
You could download the app, take your smartphone with you, and record the event concomitantly with brushing your teeth.
If there’s some reason you can’t do that, you could buy a very cheap, old smartphone, plug that in your bathroom, and use that as an always on, dedicated beeminder push button device!
You can print and put up a QR code that opens up your goal page, to make it quick enough to get to that it lowers the friction.
If you’re on iOS, maybe the QR code can trigger a shortcut that adds +1 to your graph (via email). I’m not sure, though; I haven’t done that yet. I have created shortcuts that I can trigger with with my voice through Siri, though. That might be as easy as a button if you have your phone or watch with you?
Otherwise, you could get something like a Flic and set it up so you can press it when you’re done brushing and have the datapoint added.
I have an NFC tag stuck on my toothbrush so that when it is scanned when I start to do my teeth. It posts a tweet using Tasker (when nfc tag is scanned, send message to twitter with #Beeteeth).
With the NFC tag scanned it triggers a 2 minute countdown on phone and plays a 2 minute+ song to enjoy whilst brushing making me more likely to brush and celebrate doing them.
Wow I wish I could give you more than one heart upvote! I’m not familiar with NFC tech, and have a couple of questions. What do you scan it with? How close do you have to be to scan it? Is there a potential of accidentally scanning from just going into the bathroom? Does your system automatically update beeminder?
Thanks everyone. Based on these ideas, I developed and implemented the following method.
I say “Hey Google, I brushed my teeth” to my phone and it updates Beeminder.
I used the IFTTT app on my phone to link Google Assistant with Email, and then emailed “^ 1” to bot@beeminder.com using “Update phickman/teeth-brush” as the subject. Pretty cool, I’m really enjoying Beeminder!
Potential feature for me: put a google home mini in the bathroom to listen for this. I’d rather have the listening device be stationary within the bathroom instead of need to carry it with me.
I think a cheap, old Android phone could do this. The one thing is that you’d want it to be locked and also responsive to your voice. Or perhaps just use a secondary Google account.
I scan the NFC tag with my phone which is pretty much always on me. I have to pretty much touch the brush to the phone for the tag to be picked up so very difficult to accidently trigger the tag.
I have Macrodroid (more friendly version of Tasker) setup so that when the NFC tag is scanned it sends a tweet from a throw away twitter account. This tweet is picked up by Beeminder from the hashtag used in the tweet.
I also use the same NFC tag to dismiss my Sleep As Android morning alarm. Means that on waking up, I have little reason not to do my teeth.
That’s also very clever. I like the idea of linking behaviors/commitments like that.