Weeks, captures and history¶
A metric is always live: it reads the data as it is now. That's right for today, and wrong for a record. A capture saves a goal list's numbers as they stood when a period ended, so last week's review still says what it said last week.
What it represents¶
A capture is a snapshot of one goal list for one period: each goal's value, its status, and the target it was judged against. Three things make it a record you can trust:
- It keeps the target of the moment. Changing a target later doesn't rewrite a saved week.
- Nothing is overwritten. Saving a period again adds a new capture beside the old one. Pages show the newest, and History keeps them all.
- It survives the data changing. Rows get edited, closed and deleted. The capture holds the number as it was.
This is what a spreadsheet with one tab per week does by hand.
How it's set up¶
Weekly capture is on from the start. Every Monday the week just ended is saved automatically. This needs the scheduler and a background worker running.
History, on a goal list's page, is where you choose what else to track: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly, in any combination. Each tracked period is captured once it ends. Turning a rhythm off keeps what it captured.
A week that was never saved is worked out when you look at it, against today's targets. If you can edit the list, Save this week saves the one you're on, and Save past weeks fills in earlier ones.
A target that suits a week often doesn't suit an hour. In the goal list's editor, Targets by cadence sets a target for each rhythm.
How to use it¶
Weeks (top right of a goal list) has three views:
- One week shows a week, Monday to Sunday, like the meeting view, with each goal's change from the week before. A dot marks a saved week.
- Week over week puts goals down the side and weeks across, eight at a time, and downloads as CSV.
- Trends takes one week and shows the four before it and the weeks since, for each goal: a bar per week, that week against the one before and against the average, the run it's on, and its best and worst week.
History shows the same grid at any tracked rhythm. Open on a period lists every capture of it, newest first, with who or what took each.
In a playlist, a goal list slide can show Last week exactly as it was saved, or the Week over week grid.
Good to know¶
- A number that doesn't depend on time, like open tickets right now, is captured as it stands. Capturing is the only way to keep a history of a number like that, and it can't be filled in for the past.
- Values entered by hand can arrive late. Typing last week's number on Monday morning adds a new capture of that week, with the target the week was saved with.
- A capture uses the access of the list's owner. If you can't read a metric's data, you still won't see its saved values.
- Old fine-grained captures are cleared out: hourly ones after 90 days, daily ones after 2 years. Weekly, monthly and quarterly ones are kept.
- A blank cell means nothing was captured for that period.