Is it just the reason all goals in Beeminderland are cumulative, as @grayson beautifully articulated it in her classic Baby Got Bonus post?
That’s a great post but it doesn’t apply here. Urgency days aren’t an accomplishment you accumulate; they’re something you’re trying to get rid of.
Haha, I don’t know that I have a good answer. 
My goals are cumulative almost without exception, and I basically never think to do otherwise.
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So how does it work to beemind urgency load? Sorry I’m just confused about what you actually do with it, lol
For me, urgency load is a lagging indicator of being “too much”.
Honestly, I don’t need to beemind it, but I do need the number and the graph.
I’ve been tracking this for nearly a year, and there has been only one time where I’ve even come close to derailing.
If my numbers are consistently lower than the 20s, I can take on more things. If they’re consistently in the 30s or higher, I’m overwhelmed.
This has been one of the most valuable things to my “life system” in the past decade, easily.
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I understand that part - it seems like a really good idea and I want to try it - but I’m really confused about your graph. Right now it shows numbers at about 10,000 (because it’s cumulative) with a hard cap of 198. Does the 10,000 have any kind of meaning? Where are you seeing numbers in their 20s or 30s?
Do you cron the current urgency throughout the day, and delete any previous urgency score from today when a new one is sent in by the cronjob? And then you just look at the data sent in from your cronjob, rather than the graph or numbers there?
I use it in two ways:
- I look at the most recent datapoint, which does update throughout the day. The comment is of the form:
x: goal1, goal2, goal3 y: goal4, goal5 z: goal 6
where x y and z are numbers, sorted from biggest to smallest, which represent the score of just that goal. I stop at 0, so if I had an urgency score of 3 due to just one goal, it’d say
3: thatslug
This provides another view of the dashboard, honestly, sorted by duedate.
- I also use the shape of the graph to tell me how my life is going. I am always impressed by being able to look at my graph and get actionable things, like “Oh, when I did that project in November, I put things on pause, and look, I didn’t get back on track for WEEKS”.
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Would you be willing to share your code for that?
And wouldn’t the non-cumulative version be more helpful for telling how your life is going? It’s really the number of urgency days over time that indicates how your life is going - and the rate of change of those - not the cumulative total, right?
as it is, you’re having to read first and second derivatives off of your graph, right?
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!
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