So I wrote this post back in 2019 about how I use tags to make myself a separate work and life dashboards for my Beeminders. Danny mentioned my dashboard stuff in a recent beemail, so I thought I’d dip back in and elaborate on how I’m using it currently.
Firefox
I use firefox for my Beeminder dashboards. That’s so I can use the BeeBrowse extension for extra-collapsing goals. That makes my working set of goals fit onto the screen better without scrolling.
I also only use Firefox for my Beeminder dashboards, which has the effect of turning it into a dedicated Beeminder app. When I Cmd+Tab to Firefox, macOS automatically switches me to the desktop space where my dashboards live. (If I had other Firefox windows open on other spaces, then I wouldn’t reliably land on the right one).
There are other ways to accomplish this – both Chrome and Safari browsers let you save a website as an app. In Safari it’s called “Add to Dock”, and in Chrome it’s “Create a Shortcut” (with “Open as window” checked). But the only-use-firefox-for-Beeminder works well for me.
Tags
I launch two firefox windows: one at /b#work and one at /b#!work. The bang is like a logical “not”, so the second window shows anything not tagged work. By default, new goals won’t show up in my work dashboard until I actively tag them. Sometimes that creates a bit of confusion but I typically notice by the first time the goal goes red.
Group goals get sorted with tags as well. For work-related group goals (we do some of the meta goals like UVIs as group goals just so they show up in our own personal dashboards and don’t go out of mind), I need to get the goal owner to add the work tag.
Side by Side
MacOS has a feature called Split View that lets you put two windows side by side in their own fullscreen space. I set up my two dashboards this way:
At the beginning of my day I reload the page and expand all my red goals, plus any others I’d like to work on that day. For example, on the right my cluttermania goal is still open as it’s the only orange I haven’t entered any data on for today yet.
If you double click a goal’s > hexy chevron, it refreshes that goal from the database. So if I enter data on my phone, or it’s a group goal updated by someone else, or it’s an autodata goal, I can double-click to pull in the latest. And then when I’m done with the goal for the day I extra-collapse it.
Silliness
I don’t like the double-click-to-refresh interface, but that’s a fight I lost a while back. Keyboard shortcuts would be nice – maybe I could add keyboard shortcuts to expand and collapse and refresh lines, and then I wouldn’t have to double click to refresh. I also dismissed the extra-collapse when it was first pitched to me, but it turns out that I really like it after all, especially with the rainbow-colored dashboard. So making that a native feature is in my pile of “funtimes” projects for Beeminder.
