Beeminder.com logo

Like HabitRPG, Beeminder is a service that helps keep people motivated and accountable for their tasks. However, Beeminder does this through the use of a "yellow brick road" tracking system.

What is Beeminder? Edit

Beeminder lets you track your progress for any goal that can be measured with a number (e.g. number of pages of a book read, amount of weight lost, distance run, number of HabitRPG To-Dos completed). Beeminder plots your progress towards your goal along a "yellow brick road" on a graph. What keeps you accountable? Well, Beeminder packs a significant "sting" – if you fall off track, they take your real-life money.

For more information, see Beeminder's Overview.

How does the "Yellow Brick Road" tracking system work?Edit

When you create a goal on Beeminder you tell it what you want to commit to, which is represented by the steepness of the yellow brick road. If you want to complete 8 To-Dos per week, then 8 is the slope on the graph. The y-axis shows the cumulative total To-Dos completed. Or if you're beeminding number of remaining To-Dos, then the graph starts at your current number and slopes downward at the rate you specify, say, -3 To-Dos per week. In the case of beeminding more To-Dos completed, you have to stay on or above that yellow brick road. In the case of reducing remaining To-Dos, you have to stay on or below it.

There are also fancy interfaces for scheduling breaks in the road, throwing away excess safety buffer you may have built up, and changing what you've committed to. The catch is that any changes you make take a week to take effect.

They take my money?? Is it safe?Edit

Beeminder has several features that make it safe to trust:

• Beeminder takes your money only when your goal derails and it gives you clear warnings when you are close to derailing by changing the color of the goal and sending you emails.
• When your goal derails, Beeminder will immediately send you an automatic email to notify you. You can reply to tell them if the derailment should not have happened (e.g., if Beeminder made a mistake, or you didn't have internet access to see your goal, or if HabitRPG had an outage that prevented Beeminder from fetching your data, etc.). They will not take your money, or will refund your money if they have already taken it.
• When you sign up to Beeminder, your first few goals are "freebees" — you can start a goal without pledging any money at all and without providing credit card details. If the goal derails, you don't lose money. If you want to continue with that goal, you can do so by pledging $5, but you can also choose to abandon the goal with no penalty.
• When you start a new goal (whether it's a freebee or not), you can choose to start with the first week being "flat", which means that no matter how poorly you perform, you cannot derail in the first week. This gives you time to get used to having the goal as part of your life before your money is at risk.
• After you create a goal, you can change its "steepness" (i.e., how much you need to do each day to avoid derailing). However to protect yourself from your own akrasia (procrastination, lack of self-control, etc.), any changes you make don't take effect until a week later.

Beeminder-HabitRPG IntegrationEdit

1. Go to Beeminder's HabitRPG page — it will prompt you to create a Beeminder account if you don't have one.
2. Enter your HabitRPG Unique User ID (UUID) and API Token. These are not the same as your HabitRPG username and password. The Beeminder page links to the HabitRPG page (API Options) where you can find them. Just be sure to be signed in to HabitRPG.
3. Click the "Habitualize" button.
4. Choose the appropriate options:
   • Decide whether you want to beemind more completed To-Dos or to beemind whittling down a backlog of remaining To-Dos.
   • Select one tag to beemind, or use the default of "All To-Dos" (all tags).
   • Enter the number of To-Dos per week that you would like to be accountable for (e.g., have 10 more complete To-Dos every week, or have 10 fewer ("-10") remaining To-Dos each week).
   • Leave the "Start with a week of safety buffer" checkbox ticked if you are not sure what it means (it will give you a week to get used to the goal before you are put at risk of derailing).
   • Enter a name for your goal.
   • Optionally, adjust the URL of the goal (this is the URL you will use to access that goal in your browser; you do not need to change this if you don't want to).
5. Click the "Submit" button.

For more details, refer to Beeminder's blog post, Beeminder ♥ HabitRPG.

Deleting Completed To-Dos Without Confusing BeeminderEdit

If you're beeminding remaining To-Dos then it doesn't matter — delete completed To-Dos all you like.

If you're beeminding more completed To-Dos then safest is to not ever delete any. But if you want to clear them out, make sure to hit the refresh button on Beeminder (above your graph) before and after doing so. That way Beeminder sees all the To-Dos before you delete them and sees the zero datapoint after they're deleted as well. Beeminder treats that zero as a special case, like an odometer reset, and keeps the count going. (Gory details from the Beeminder FAQ.)

Beeminder and Challenge To-DosEdit

Currently, the only Beeminder-HabitRPG goals are for tracking how many active or completed To-Dos you have. To-Dos from challenges are not included. This is because you have much less control over challenge To-Dos than you have over your own To-Dos. Challenge To-Dos are automatically deleted when a challenge ends (which could cause you to derail on a "More Completed To-Dos" goal). Additional active challenge To-Dos can be added to your task list at any time if the challenge creator decides to add more To-Dos (which could cause you to derail on a "Fewer Remaining To-Dos" goal).

Beeminder and CronEdit

Each day when you are not resting in the Inn, Cron is triggered the first time "you" take any action on the site after midnight (or after your Custom Day Start time if you use one). "You" means your account, so any third-party tool using your account can trigger Cron. This means that if you have a Beeminder HabitRPG goal, Cron is likely to be triggered every day shortly after midnight/CDS, when Beeminder uses your account to count your To-Dos.

There is no way to stop this, however there is usually no reason to consider this a bad thing.

The only circumstance under which it might be bad is if your party members often do so much damage overnight that you would be killed except that a Healer in your party casts healing skills to raise your health before you start using HabitRPG each day (thereby preventing your death). If Beeminder triggers Cron after the damage has been done and before the Healer has had time to cast skills, then you will die immediately.

If you have two or more Beeminder-HabitRPG goals, you might find that Cron runs two or more times each night, if each of the goals separately use your HabitRPG account at the same time shortly after midnight/CDS. This would cause you and your party members two or more times the damage you should receive. It is likely that future updates to Cron would stop this happening, but until then, it might be safest to not use more than one Beeminder HabitRPG goal.

How to get HelpEdit

If you're having trouble using the Beeminder-HabitRPG integration, first, read all of this page, then go to the Beeminder integration problems - ask questions here! forum thread and read it to see if your question has already been answered. If not, post a reply there to ask your question or ask in the Beeminder guild.

LinksEdit

Beeminder Guild in HabitRPG

HabitRPG's blog post about the integration between Beeminder and HabitRPG

Beeminder's blog post about the integration between Beeminder and HabitRPG

Beeminder's HabitRPG goal creation page

Beeminder's HabitRPG forum