There's this great site called Beeminder for keeping track of goals, whether it's studying more, working more, weight loss, doing more writing, or whatever. I think it's got an excellent approach, and it makes great graphs. You can check it out here:

https://www.beeminder.com/

I've been using it to make sure I get an average of 5 hours a day of iOS app development, after my other work. Recently, I talked with the Beeminder developers and added an experimental Skritter sync feature: Skritter can now post your progress time to Beeminder each day, making it easy to set goals for yourself. Here's my graph:

https://www.beeminder.com/nick/goals/skritter

I'm posting this to wonder if anyone else is interested in having a Beeminder goal of their Skritter time. There's no front-end for it, so if you want to try it out, you'd create a Beeminder account and goal and then let me know the goal URL. If people like it, then I'd add a user interface to the Skritter site for it.

What do y'all think?

Sounds interesting. Maybe it could give me a little extra push to skritter some more. I'm game. Let's try it!

https://www.beeminder.com/xiaobill/goals/skritter

Okay, I've set it up for you. It should start posting tonight. The timezones may be whack.

This looks really cool, and probably would help me to get a steady rate of skrittering done - right now it varies loads depending on my coursework.

The graphs on your page look very complicated though - how much maintenance does it need to give meaningful results?

p.s. I've set up https://www.beeminder.com/cia09cr/goals/skriter

Catherine, it's set up.

You can either not set a goal, in which case you don't have to do anything, or you can set a goal. If you set the goal, the only maintenance you would have to do is to change the goal a week in advance if you find it too easy or too hard.

Danny of Beeminder here. We sure love you, Nick!

I'd love to answer questions about the Beeminder side of this as well.

To add to Nick's answer to Catherine, setting a goal means making the "yellow brick road" steeper using the MAKEITSO button below your graph that appears if you're signed in. The steepness of the road is the number of minutes per week you want to commit to skrittering.

PS: Typo in your URL, Catherine: http://beeminder.com/cia09cr/skritter

Thanks for that :)
So, are data points the time spent, and the comments for each one include the number of items studied automatically, or did Nick add those?
Thanks
Catherine

Yes, the time spent in minutes. Those should happen automatically, if you study on a day (it won't post a 0). But it might not be working right: xiaobill's didn't add the time yet. I'll check it out soon.

Ok, cool. That's fine, don't worry about it - The IOS App is suddenly more important now that I have an Iphone!!
I can see beeminder becoming addictive-skitter is already like a game so adding goals is great. Is the intention to integrate this with the progress if it is successful? I could see some competition/leaderboard emerging! Though I suppose you already have the existing stats and the top Skritterers in the newsletter so probably not too high on the agenda.

If enough Skritterers found it useful, we could do more with this. Beeminder really has the right idea for how to setup the incentive structure and give feedback on progress toward a goal.

Looks like I made a typo when setting this up, which is why it hasn't been posting. I've done it again, so it should work this time, starting tomorrow.

It looks like its working. I don't really understand the graph, but I do like that it shows how long I studied AND the number of items. :

5 42 "studied 368 items"
6 1.97 "studied 16 items"
7 41.7 "studied 385 items"
8 70.27 "studied 664 items"
9 59.98 "studied 539 items"

Finally finished all 4kyu,3kyu, and radicals. If I keep this rate up, hopefully I should be through 2kyu & 1kyu by July.

/looks at list. 4200 + 3400 = 7600

So, looks like I need to keep up this pace. 50 items a day.
自分の挑戦！行くぜ！

xiaobill, the graph might make more sense if you set a minutes-per-day goal--currently there is no goal, so the road is flat. If on this page you set it to 60:

https://www.beeminder.com/xiaobill/goals/skritter

--then it will start increasing the steepness of the road you have to keep up with, starting in a week.

Alright. Changed it to "60 Minutes a Day". Let's see how this works. :)

I think Nick meant the box under the graph -

Make next week easier or harder: [number of minutes] /week Makeitso

so you'd put 420 in for an hour a day - and click "make it so". You'll see the yellow brick road change steepness.

Edit: by the way, when does it update? At the end of the day according to Skritter, so 3am ish? Just wondering, it doesn't really affect studying.

As it's totally not dealing with timezones right now, the data gets sent over at 2:55 am Eastern time. Skritter days end at 4:00 am in your Skritter timezone, whereas Beeminder days end at 3:00 am in your Beeminder timezone.

Cool thanks. I'm not sure if it's been working - I've not studied much since it was set up, so I'll keep looking out for it, but I think it should have updated this morning at 7:55am GMT with yesterday's data.

I made another typo setting it up because I was so focused on not writing "ciao9r" instead of "cia09cr", so it wasn't posting. Hopefully it will post tonight. Not retroactive, unfortunately.

You could manually post some past days' data so that you don't unfairly lose your Beeminder goal, since Skritter hasn't been fulfilling its end yet. Alternatively, Daniel would help you out if you needed.

Ah ok, that's allright. I'll just try and catch up in the next few days, or add some rough guesses from the last day or two. I've barely studied anyway though! Thanks for the help.

Yes, I just retroactively flattened the yellow brick road in light of the technical glitches. Dial it back up when ready!

love to try, however i usually have my goal not time, but chars i need to memorize by certain date

https://www.beeminder.com/wshaari/goals/hanzi

Okay, let's see if this works!

Hi, I've reset my graph recently but the link doesn't seem to be working - has something changed? It only worked once before Christmas!

Alas--I know not. I will put it on my list to check it out at some point.

Thanks :)
It's quite successful just manually inputting the data for now, helps to visualise my progress.

I 'm doing Chinese characters per week if that will fit into things.

https://www.beeminder.com/dennis/goals/hanzi

I forgot to mention why I'm tracking characters and not time spent. The characters I'm tracking are from Heisig so most of the time I'm working on the Heisig characters outside of Skritter. I put them into Skritter as a test of the characters I've covered and should remember and for the SRS.

Dennis, I don't have it working right now, but when I get some time to fix it, I'll add your goal to automatically update. You could manually update it if you wanted to use Beeminder until then.

Thanks, Nick. I am doing it manually and tried several ways of setting things up until I got a feel for how it works.