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I'm developing an organizer with a lot of gamification, to manage regular actions as Quests with rewards for completion. And much more

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I’m from Ukraine, so bare with my English.)

For some months I develop game-mechanics and for a few weeks I try an implementation on Airtable. And I have some issues and some problems here. So I would be quite grateful for some help.

My DB consists of lots of tables, among them are ASPIRATIONS (what I try to achieve by my actions), ACTIONS (list of actions I presume to be potentially helpful if practiced regularly), QUESTS (taking an action for some exact number of repetitions during a period of time), DAYS (every record is a day of game with according events), REPETITIONS (each repetition of each quest must be there), TRANSACTION (each gain or loss of points must be accounted for).

For example I add an Aspiration like “Lose 10 kilos of body weight”, then I add Actions wich I see helpful with such a target like “Run a mile a day”, then I may take a Quest with this Action. If I see subjective difficulty of this Action as 3 (of 10), than taking this Action in a Quest for a week will cost me 3*7=21 points. Every day it would bring me 1 point and on 7th day it may be completed with getting back my 21 points. That if I do not fail.

So in my table DAYS I would like to see my current number of points for each of previous days.

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    • John_Beaudoin
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    • October 28, 2016

    Hey there! I’ve done some work in Airtable on a similar idea, and there are limitations that I haven’t been able to overcome. In my base, I have a top level set of Realms – specific parts of our lives like “Work,” “Home,” “Health” and “Personal Development.” In each Realm, I have Goals (what you might be calling Aspirations): Goals are indeterminate in length and can include multiple Projects and Practices (what you might call Quests). A Project is a set of Actions that need to be completed to finish the project, while a Practice is a habit, or set of habits, that are repeated. Actions are tasks, events, workouts, etc – discrete actions that may or may not be repeated, may or may not be due on a particular date, may or may not be scheduled at a particular time. My implementation would award points for completion of Actions, Projects and Practices (the Actions table carries the point schedule and those roll up into Projects and Practices, and to Goals). I have Days table too, but the problem I’ve faced is that Airtable can’t automatically link records based on the date. I work around this problem when I log activities – instead of using a date field, I have the user select the date which is the name of a record in the Days table. But this is clunky for the user interface and it makes it hard to use the actual date in Views. Good luck! (PS - Have you seen the SuperBetter app? https://www.superbetter.com/)

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    • November 3, 2016
    John_Beaudoin wrote:

    Hey there! I’ve done some work in Airtable on a similar idea, and there are limitations that I haven’t been able to overcome. In my base, I have a top level set of Realms – specific parts of our lives like “Work,” “Home,” “Health” and “Personal Development.” In each Realm, I have Goals (what you might be calling Aspirations): Goals are indeterminate in length and can include multiple Projects and Practices (what you might call Quests). A Project is a set of Actions that need to be completed to finish the project, while a Practice is a habit, or set of habits, that are repeated. Actions are tasks, events, workouts, etc – discrete actions that may or may not be repeated, may or may not be due on a particular date, may or may not be scheduled at a particular time. My implementation would award points for completion of Actions, Projects and Practices (the Actions table carries the point schedule and those roll up into Projects and Practices, and to Goals). I have Days table too, but the problem I’ve faced is that Airtable can’t automatically link records based on the date. I work around this problem when I log activities – instead of using a date field, I have the user select the date which is the name of a record in the Days table. But this is clunky for the user interface and it makes it hard to use the actual date in Views. Good luck! (PS - Have you seen the SuperBetter app? https://www.superbetter.com/)


    Yes, I tried Super Better a year or two ago. Sadly it is way beyond the level of complexity and configurability I currently need. I grew tired of filling days and dates in AirTable and of linking records by them. When I need to do this 10 times a day, and there are hundreds of them, it’s just too slow and uncomfortable. So I returned to my trustworthy Google Sheet for that. And now I’m just using AirTable for Aspirations and Activities with one-to-many linking both ways. And also I register each my Quest here, but without filling the Date field or linking records by it. So all my calculations went back to Google Sheets. Also I really often need a formula in this cell and that one, and in the other two, but not in the rest of them (in the same column), and the the formulas are slightly different. Google Sheets has no problems with that where AirTable only allowes me to fill formula for the whole field (column ).

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