(Continuing the discussion from Suggestions for additions to the Complice integration)
16 pomodoros later, this feature, now called Beemind Arbitrary Tasks, is live! I’ve added a third thing you can track, which is numbers: you can use this for tracking time: “10 minutes meditating” or for tracking workouts or pages read or sales called made or countless other things I’m sure. It correctly identifies negative numbers and decimals. Times (e.g. 8:30) don’t work, though if there’s an appetite for that I could add it.
@dtedesco1, you can use this for your complice dailies, like this if you’re using the (-first format:
@dehowell, you can use this feature to do the pomodoro→minutes thing that you want for your writing goal, by tracking pomos and adding a ×25 multiplier:
Want to track only pomos towards starred tasks? Done:
I am incredibly stoked about this. Let @dreev and me know what you guys come up with. We’ll do a blog post about it soon where we collect a bunch of the best ideas.
(Also let me know if you have other ideas for what-to-track options, to add to “done”, “pomosDone” and “number”.)
This feature makes me feel like I’m seriously delivering on the beeminder.com/complice headline: "The Ultimate Goal-tracking Package"
5 Likes
(Oh yeah, and go to complice.co/apps/beeminder to try these out)
1 Like
This is great! Testing it out now.
Also, the “just press play” approach has been working. I want to keep it up
a bit longer before writing a post. I’ll follow up in a week or so.
Hope you’re well.
Dan
Thanks, Malcolm. Tried it out just now with logging time from my meditation daily to my Beeminder goal. Worked great! Now I can go back to setting up my writing time goal and try it out there…
1 Like
Womp womp womp, another thing you can beemind. It’s a slight variation on the number one: instead of taking the last number, it adds all of the numbers. But you can also do negative numbers, and it also supports having a space between the − and the number for negative numbers, which means you can basically just do addition and subtraction.
All this would on some level be unnecessary if Complice let you edit task text or number text, and yet I think it’s still valuable: knowing I did 135 seconds of handstand practice today is less interesting than knowing I did (35+30+25+45) seconds.
datapoint:
9 135 "2016-06-09 CompliceArbitrarySum for 3) handstands 30 + 35 + 25 +45"
Anybody doing anything else cool with this?
2 Likes
How about some way to track percentage of starred outcomes completed? 
Then (with starred tasks modeled as Coveyian ‘big rocks’ that need to be prioritized else Bad Things happen) items that really aught to get done today can be akrasia-proofed a little more.
This would be sort of like that one must-do task technique that Ms. Harris ‘shamelessly stole from Beeminder co-founder Danny Reeves @dreev’, except flexible in the number of must-do items each day. Just beemind the percentage of starred outcomes completed, setting the rate to something like 95%. Instant must do, or else.
The ability to do something like this would be especially handy with repeat tasks that—for some reason or another—keep being squished out of your (arguably?) correctly tuned system.
1 Like
After thinking some more, it might be more useful generally (as in, applicable to a wider selection of use cases) to stack on the capability to track outcomes un-completed, instead of outcome-completed percentage.
That would allow Complice to make use of Do Less goals, which I otherwise can’t think of a way to integrate, given the current implementation. Plus it’s simpler to add; just another ‘What To Track’ mode rather like “track tasks marked complete”, except “track the number of tasks not marked complete” with maybe an X or the No symbol.
1 Like
Very exciting! Thanks, Malcolm. One question: does the data get sent to Beeminder upon marking a task complete, or based on the day’s submitted outcomes?
1 Like
Good question: task completion.
2 Likes
I’ve encountered a problem.
I have a Beeminder-linked task as follows:
My task for today reads
But when I mark it complete, Complice doesn’t update the associated Beeminder goal.
(This is actually iteration 4 of this problem; I originally had “stomp” as my text filter, then “stomp-jumps”, and neither of these worked, either, for the associated task of “6) stomp-jumps 50”. Ditto on “stompjumps” and “6) stompjumps 50”.)
Any idea why this is failing? For comparison, other similar task-Beeminder links are working fine (text filter “Kegel” and task “6) Kegels 10”; text filter “pushup” and task “6) pushups 4” <— don’t laugh, I’m 5’3", 52 kilos, and female, just starting out doing the real-man version 
).
1 Like
You found a bug! (It’s fixed now).
The regex I use to sum numbers was getting tripped up because it was matching the - in the middle of “stomp-jumps”, and then trying to add 50 to "-", which produced NaN (not a number).
Huh, though that doesn’t explain why stompjumps would have been failing. Unless the task itself had the hyphen the whole time, because that’s what matters for this bit.
2 Likes
Awesome! And thank you.
I took another look at all the task permutations I’d tried and indeed, the one for stompjumps just appended stompjumps to the original stomp-jumps 50 task, so it’s likely you’ve found and fixed the whole problem.
I’ve already manually entered the data point for today, so I’ll report back after tomorrow’s entry.
1 Like
Update: Problem solved! This worked perfectly today.
(There’s a hyphen in stomp-jumps, to test it properly.)
Thanks, Malcolm!
More unexpected behavior:
I entered this task as 6) pushups 4 . I later appended -4 rest day to the task, then marked it complete. I expected Complice to send a 0 to the associated Beeminder goal with the text "2016-06-26 CompliceArbitrarySum for (6) pushups 4 -4 rest day". Instead, nothing got sent.
Not a make-or-break-er, since the net tracking result is the same, but it’d be really nice if this worked as I’d expected, so I can record why I didn’t do an intention (rest day, forgot, too busy, whatever) at Beeminder for later reference.
I’ve hit another snag. I have these goals:
And this task:
When I marked the task complete, it updated the first Beeminder goal, but didn’t update the second one. The hover help on the regex box says it ignores case, so the problem shouldn’t be Mandarin vs mandarin… What am I missing?
(For context, I have additional links like the second one to record data points for other languages; the first polyglot link records whether I worked on any language.)
1 Like
Ahh yeah, the rest day thing is I think working as designed, because in
general it doesn’t make sense to send zero datapoints to beeminder. I see
the argument in this case though, so I’ll see if there’s a reasonable way
to code it.
The issue with the regex is you don’t have it enabled! click it and it’ll
turn orange. If not orange, it’s doing substring matching.
Oh, excellent! I love simple solutions.
1 Like
I just started looking at using Beeminder from Complice. On the Complice Beeminder Integration page at the very bottom the widget is showing an old state of an archived goal (I think). Anyhow, as of this instant my Beeminder dashboard has no goals in it but the Complice Beeminder widget on the Integration page (and now on my Today page) is showing an obsolete goal state (a derailment). The Complice Beeminder widget says “fetched 0 min. ago”.
1 Like
Complice is now correctly showing no goals. So perhaps there was a housekeeping process that had to tidy things up. Anyhow, things are fine right now.
I want to beemind accomplishing prioities!
