Combining check-ins with the habitcal
Posted: Wed Sep 26, 2007 2:07 pm
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
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