Why does Beeminder think it's already tomorrow or still yesterday?

On your Beeminder dashboard, each goal has a dropdown you can use to enter data for past days, including "today" and "yesterday"... but sometimes Beeminder's idea of what "today" is won't match what day it actually is in your part of the world. It might say "today" is the 5th when your calendar says it's only the 4th, for example, or the 5th when it's already the 6th.

There are two causes for this: custom deadlines and non-matching timezones (see below for more info).

If neither of those seem like the issue, it's also worth refreshing the page, because we don't automatically refresh after your deadline or after midnight. If that doesn't help, then contact support to talk it over! We'd love to get it figured out with you.

Custom deadlines

This is the most common cause for an apparent discrepancy. If a goal has its deadline set to earlier than midnight, and you're looking at the goal after that time has passed, you'll find that the date has already rolled over to the next day. Conversely, if you have a deadline later than midnight, the date won't change until the deadline, instead of changing after midnight.

In other words, the deadline time you set for a goal sets the boundaries of the goal's calendar days, as if you're moving the time midnight and the date change hit.

If your goals have varying deadlines, "today" might mean the 5th for some, but still the 4th for others. Make sure that you pick the right day the work should count for before you submit your data! We've set the default so that if the goal thinks it's the 5th, then the data entry form will say the 5th unless you change it. You need to manually refresh the page if your deadline has passed to get this to update, though: it doesn't update dynamically.

Check out "What times are allowed?" in the deadlines help page for more information. You might also be amused by our ancient blog post announcing the arbitrary deadlines feature.

Timezones

The simpler (but less common) culprit is that your timezone is set incorrectly! Your timezone isn't synced up automatically because that might derail you instantly (depending on your direction of travel), so if it doesn't match your current timezone, you'll need to update it in your account settings. On the web version, we'll pop up a banner at the top of the page when this is the case.

Keywords: Beeminder's conception of dates, end-of-day, deadlines, Beeminder day vs calendar day, generalized midnight