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Combining check-ins with the habitcal

Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 2:07 pm
by reinhard
I've been very happy with the habitcal over the last few months, but there's one feature it doesn't have that has really been bugging me: the ability to "qualify" failures and non-weekend S-days (NWS days), to describe how bad they were and why they happened ("negative tracking"). Successes, like Tolstoy's happy families, are pretty much all alike. Green is all you need to know. But each failure or exception is interesting in itself -- and knowing you'll have to fess up in detail it is a good motivator to keep failures contained when they happen.

I've been wracking my brains to come up with an elegant technical solution... nothing seems quite right (do you associate the free text qualification with a day, a habit/day, multiple habit days? do you display them on mouseover, or below each habit/month calendar?) . But it occurred to me a few days ago that a pretty good solution to the problem exists right now: just use the daily checkin to qualify events like these.

I've just started doing this on my own check-in and I think it will be useful. A good first step baby integration might be to automatically provide a link between user checkins and habitcals. I'll keep mulling over ways to provide even tighter integration, but I think this might even be enough. There's something to be said for keeping the "quantification" of the habitcal and the "qualification" of the check-in simple and separable (though a bit of an association, like a link, would be nice).

Reinhard

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2007 11:59 pm
by navin
This would be useful if you're using Habitcal for No-S. But I've thought of using it for other things, in which case there won't be as much of a benefit with this strategy.

Then again, while I've *thought* about using it, I haven't actually started a Habitcal yet so take any of my suggestions for what they're worth. :oops:

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 1:15 pm
by reinhard
Yeah, another thing I should do is move the daily checkin from the nosdiet section to the more general everyday systems section. People (inluding myself) have been using it to track multiple habits for a while, so the placement should reflect that. I should also nix the "daily" part.

Reinhard

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 4:39 pm
by gratefuldeb67
Hi Reinhard!
I wouldn't be too concerned about nixing the "daily" part of the title.
Even tho people don't always do it daily and you seem to be assuming (??) that the daily part will be taken care of by the HabitCal, I'd say just leave it as is, because, for one, people reading that will be a bit more encouraged perhaps, to check in more often, and while HabitCal is awesome, some people, myself included, find solace in a place where they can have a kind of personal diary space here, not just to track the success and failures. I know I did just that for quite some time, and it was invaluable to me, as a place to write and vent whenever I wanted.

What I would do, is somehow, in your description above the subsection "Daily checkin or Checkin" whatever you choose, to mention that this should be combined with daily checkins on the HabitCal, for those who don't know about it yet, so they get integrated together.. :)

Have a great week!
Peace and Love,
8) Debs x

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2007 2:04 pm
by reinhard
Thanks for the advice, Deb.

I'm going to procrastinate on this a little more because I'm not quite satisfied yet by what I have in mind... it would be awfully nice to have the qualification directly on the habitcal page, and I think I've thought of a way to do this unobtrusively.

Reinhard

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 5:18 pm
by urbansix
reinhard wrote:Yeah, another thing I should do is move the daily checkin from the nosdiet section to the more general everyday systems section. People (inluding myself) have been using it to track multiple habits for a while, so the placement should reflect that. I should also nix the "daily" part.

Reinhard
I'd second moving the daily checkin from NoS to a general area. I've been hankering to start a shovelglove blog or checkin ("Shlog"?) or a general habit blog/checkin but don't know where to put it. My other thought was to just log it on Blogger, and put a link in my sig. I dunno - then sometimes I revert back to "publishing my inner monolog on the subject of my shortcomings = vain and trivial" my inner cynic talking. But yeah - one vote for a place for habit tracking self-commentary.