I’ve been wanting to create and track a metric like this, and I find out all the work has already been done! I’m always humbled and pleasantly surprised by all the work that has been done and all the experiments that have been performed before.
Anyway, I’ve been playing around with this metric, as returned by the API. Something didn’t feel quite right. I realized that “won” goals (finished, but not yet archived) contribute to the metric. This can easily be seen if you have jq installed[0].
API poking
urgency_load as returned by the API:
curl -s -X GET https://www.beeminder.com/api/v1/users/$username/goals.json?auth_token=$token | jq '[.[] | select(true) | select(.safebuf < 7) | 7 - .safebuf ] | add'
urgency_load, for active goals only:
curl -s -X GET https://www.beeminder.com/api/v1/users/$username/goals.json?auth_token=$token | jq '[.[] | select(.won | not) | select(.safebuf < 7) | 7 - .safebuf ] | add'
By the way, I didn’t make my goal cumulative, which felt the most natural to me.
[0] This was the perfect excuse to finally start learning this language!