Triangular beeminding for tracking alcohol consumption

[chipmanaged]

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]

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]

I have a pushups goal where I have to do just over 25 pushups / day.

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

[drmaciver]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Yes, autoratchet is a premium plan option.

[aspiers]

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

[drtall]

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.

[drmaciver]

A problem I've just realised for the meditation use case is that it doesn't count multiple sessions in the same day right for that. Two 30 minute sessions on one day should be counted the same as two 30 minute sessions on two days, not the same as a 60 minute session on one day.

You could achieve a similar effect manually by entering the square of the number of minutes you meditate when doing data entry I guess.

[dreev]

max safe days values of less than 2 are treated as 2. So you can't force an eep with that feature.

Doh, I think you're right (haven't confirmed myself yet)! We should fix that, especially if it was part of the reason anyone decided to pay for a premium plan. (Let me know!)

[dreev]

I think it should be supported natively

That's what "jolly" aggregation does, plots a 1 if you entered any data that day and a 0 otherwise. HT @jolly.

[chipmanaged]

+1 To "yes, please let me force myself to do something every day, no matter the previous day's success" Some goals work fine with safe days, others don't. I haven't figured out the pattern.

[drmaciver]

This may be infeasibly awkward, but between this request and the triangular pushups thing I'm doing it feels like it would be nice to be able to support multiple aggregation methods on a given graph with different precommitments for each aggregation method.

I guess the weak version of this would be to do it like I've got the trianglepushups goal doing and just support beeminder graphs whose autodata comes from other beeminder graphs.

[drmaciver]

Semi-relatedly, how would you feel about adding a square aggregation mode as well?

The reason is that I'm considering doing something like this for a tag time powered goal, and the triangle number formula has weird scaling factor issues for the sort of scales that would involve. Square has the nice property that doubling the amount of time I spend on something while keeping the distribution the same increases the total weekly rate by a factor of 4, while there's no similar scaling for the triangle numbers.

[philip]

If square applies to the individual datapoints, that solves the 2 x 30 minute meditation problem above.

square-sum vs sum-square

[drmaciver]

It does, but that wouldn't actually be what I want for a tagtime goal because it always records the same value which is my ping interval measured in hours.

[dreev]

feel about adding a square aggregation mode as well

Your wish is my command. Added "square", returning the square of the sum of the values each day.