Triangular beeminding for tracking alcohol consumption

drmaciver 2015-02-25 22:01:13 UTC #5

I'm also coming to this after having done the straightforward QS version and concluding that the numbers weren't actually that interesting for me - they're well within acceptable bounds, and I don't care much beyond that knowledge. But yeah if you want to do that the maths is easy - you can also just count data points because of how it's entered

drtall 2015-02-26 00:49:49 UTC #6

Yeah I burned out on my booze goals because of this too. Especially when it is a Do Less goal, the manual entry is even more burdensome.

Not sure how you could automate this, besides this thing.

insti 2015-02-26 06:29:37 UTC #7

Beeminder should allow you to enter a formula for the score, so you can enter the number of drinks as data and Beeminder does the math for you. #featurerequest

drmaciver 2015-02-26 07:42:05 UTC #8

A thing I have found previously is that do less goals work very well when I'm basically always riding up against the limit and don't really work for me at all otherwise. Basically if I can think of it in terms of "I want to do this thing. Do I currently have permission to do that?" then I can just incorporate adding the data point as a prerequisite to doing the thing and everything works smoothly. If I know I'm safe and have loads of buffer then I can just sortof forget about it (even with the pessimistic presumptions) and tell myself I'll patch it up later even when I really won't.

For example, when I was trying to use beeminder to curb my coffee consumption a while ago it was very effective, because oh god I want to drink all the coffee and beeminder was there acting as a gatekeeper. Once I relaxed the goal and raised it to a point significantly above my intake, it kinda fell apart, and that has also been my experience with a few other things I've tried.

I actually think the triangular beehives will help with this. The nice thing about the rising cost of each drink is that it's very easy to press up against the limit without that meaning you're drinking alcohol right up to the max safe number of units - it doesn't take very many drinks in an evening to blow your entire weekly points budget even when you can easily afford one or two.

dreev 2015-02-26 07:59:26 UTC #9

Oh! Now that you mention it, @insti, it's trivial for us to make a new aggday function, "triangulate" or whatever, that would be, I guess, sum*(sum+1)/2 and, voila, now @drmaciver can just enter 1's like always and the right point values will magically get graphed. (And better yet, if this turns out to be a terrible idea, he can just set aggday back to sum. Maybe we'll also have a road editor by then to retroactively make the YBR make sense for the updated aggregation function...)

Dang, now I'm so excited about how easy this is I'm going to deploy it right now!

And done!

PS: Oops, after doing this I see @drmaciver wants to ruin my fun. I even converted his trianglealcohol graph already to make sure it works. (It does!) I'll reply further in a new post...

drmaciver 2015-02-26 08:08:53 UTC #10

I don't mean to be a fun ruiner, but I confess I'm not actually sure I'll use the new aggday option. One of the things I like about the manual entry is that it makes the cost of each drink explicit: A third drink costs as much as 3 first drinks, which forces me to actually think about whether I really want it that much. I feel like I'd lose some of the psychological benefit of that if I had beeminder automatically calculating it behind the scenes.

dreev 2015-02-26 08:50:12 UTC #11

Ha, check out the PS I just added on my previous post. So, yeah, too late!

Ok, but is there a way to have the best of both worlds? Can you mention the new triangle number in the comments to emphasize to yourself how many points are being added?

Anyway, your trianglealcohol graph is converted now, so give it a try and if you really don't like it I'll convert it back for you.

For anyone else wanting to do this, setting aggday=triangle requires a custom goal, which is a premium perk.

(And we'll call this a UVI so thanks once again, David, even if you don't actually want to use this!)

drmaciver 2015-02-26 08:52:40 UTC #12

Yeah, I noticed that had happened. No problem. As you say, I'll give it a go and see what I think.

dreev 2015-02-27 17:33:17 UTC #13

Now a major motion blog post!

chipmanaged 2015-02-27 21:24:16 UTC #14

I'm definitely going to use this. There is a hobby of mine, for example, that has a diminishing return the longer I spend on it, but is worthwhile earlier, in each session, than it's worth in marathon sessions. I can track minute-points in a do-less graph to promote spreading that time spent out over longer periods, or at least to curtail the not-as-worthily marathon sessions. This might be true, too, for a goal like meditation, where (for me) a long session is worth more than three very short sessions. I could see using this for a do-more goal for meditation minutes-points.

drmaciver 2015-02-28 07:11:40 UTC #15

Hmm. Using this for do more goals is a good idea. There are a bunch of exercise goals where I tend to coast along at doing the bare minimum per day, so never actually improve my capabilities much.

e.g. I have a pushups goal where I have to do just over 25 pushups / day. If I do 26 pushups / day that gives me 2457 triangle points. I might try setting a triangular aggregated additional pushups goal set at 3000 / week to see what happens.

insti 2015-02-28 08:54:49 UTC #16

That's a pretty inspiring to me, my pushups goal is currently at 15 per week!

drmaciver 2015-02-28 09:41:05 UTC #17

Well why not try setting a triangle pushups goal of 50 and see if that helps you bring it up?

(50 triangle pushups = doing your pushups in 3 days with 5 each is just not enough. That would be 45. 7, 6 and 2 would get you to 52. 3 days with 6 pushups would comfortable exceed it at 63 points)

aspiers 2015-02-28 13:31:40 UTC #18

Thanks all, this is an interesting development

Personally I have a similar problem with averages but I'm interested in beeminding troughs more than peaks. For example, I have goals to do the following every day: a certain number of press-ups, a certain number of minutes reviewing my TODO list, and a certain number of minutes of music practice. Of course the weekly averages matter, but I also want to make sure I don't skip a day and then get away with it by doing more the next day.

In other words, I want to beemind my consistency. Can this be done?

drmaciver 2015-02-28 13:53:05 UTC #19

How much do the weekly averages matter? The easiest thing to do would be to just change your goal structure to enter datapoints as either 1 or 0 depending on whether you've done enough that day. If you do also care about the real totals then with a bit of API jiggering you could probably set that up to automatically populate a second goal which does that from the first.

aspiers 2015-02-28 13:57:29 UTC #20

The weekly averages definitely matter - I really want to track amount done rather than just binary "done" or "not done" per day. Yes probably possible through API but I have no time to do that and two goals is a bit of an ugly hack anyway - I think it should be supported natively.

chipmanaged 2015-02-28 14:21:27 UTC #21

Yup. This can be done by going into the "Terrifyingly Advanced" settings and making your "Safe Days" (at the bottom of the page) 0. That will force an eep day every single day, no matter how much you've accumulated. (That might require being on a "Bee Lite plan; I'm not sure. I was on "Plan Bee" for over a year and am on "Beemium" now, so I've kind of lost track of what's what when it comes to the different features you can get with each plan.)

drmaciver 2015-02-28 14:24:00 UTC #22

Yes, autoratchet is a premium plan option.

aspiers 2015-02-28 14:49:20 UTC #23

Ahhh OK thanks, I wasn't aware of that!

drtall 2015-02-28 16:00:09 UTC #24

Beware it doesn't actually work. I recently started premium and from what I can see, max safe days values of less than 2 are treated as 2. So you can't force an eep with that feature.