You know that Weasley clock from Harry Potter? I was thinking of something like that but for Beeminder. For quite a while now, actually. A clock that shows you where you stand… in time. With respect to your remaining goals. Something like that. And I’m not talking about this beeminderised clock.
Actually, I am. In a way. Imagine that clock but with the areas of time coloured in that will be taken up by your goals.
Think: A pie chart attached to the hour hand and each slice of the pie chart corresponds to one goal and the (estimated) time required to do it.
Sort of like the read area of this mod timer.
Not to be confused with this timer which goes the other way around:
When you procrastinate doing the work in front of you, you keep pushing and pushing it and eventually you realise just how late it is and then you realise that with all the work left you can maybe barely make it before the deadline. I’d like to make this invisible time more visible. And having this time be in front of the hour hand is a direct representation of the amount of work you still have in front of you.
Ultimately this would be awesome to have as a physical thing but I don’t think anyone wants to pay for that. So, the next best thing is to have that virtually.
I’m thinking a website, maybe SVG with javascript. SVG should totally be able to do that, including the animation.
What do you think?
Is there any SVG-savvy person here that feels the call and wants to do this, so I don’t have to?
The clock you mentioned is very interesting. One thought about the Time timer MOD is that sometimes we don’t even want to set a countdown to start doing some uncomfortable tasks…
so it’s great to have a ‘Weasley clock’, although I was wondering how do we keep tracking targets if the schedule changes?
Haven’t read Harry Potter books for a while, gonna start to read it this afternoon (to procrastinate from thesis proposal
Right! The clock needs some indication of when the deadline for the goal actually is. I just used dashed lines for that, but maybe filling the remaining area in a lighter shader of the goal color would be good? It would show you how your procrastination buffer keeps shrinking. Hm no, then you run into an issue with multiple goals overlapping.
Maybe instead of a dashed line, the deadline could be something more dangerous looking. Ideas?
Curious – how popular are time-specific deadlines (other than “end of day”)? It looks like you have use cases that spread deadlines throughout the day… would love to hear more about that.
I think they are somewhat if not very popular. Take for instance this blog post.
Most of my deadlines are at midnight or slightly later than midnight, however.
My primary use case for having an earlier deadline is so I got time in the evening to spend with my friends playing co-op video games online. This being said, I’m not 100% sold on deadlines earlier than midnight, but for the time being they do the trick.
Interesting. That waterfall concept is both brilliant and… well, it also sounds terrifyingly stressful.
I could see it being really helpful with one or two keystone habits, though, e.g. “Pick tomorrow’s frog by 6pm” as the an evening goal, and “Eat the frog by 11am” as the morning goal.
I find deadlines to be a great way to separate personal goals from work goals. Recently I set most of my personal deadlines for 9am and most of my work deadlines for 5pm.
Well there’s the problem that if all your deadlines are end-of-day you might end up trying to cram all your goals into the last hour or so of your day.
Of course if you spread them out through your day you might conflict with something else that you have to do during the day. I haven’t really found a good answer to this yet.
