"All Green" meta-beeminding goal

I basically second everything @grayson has to say here, and this has continued to be my experience about 3 weeks in.

I’ve done three sets of two all green days in a row. I find that I’m generally much on top of things than I have historically been. I went to a conference and didn’t have to email support to cry uncle, which basically never happens (though I do have two eep days today)!

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I currently have 3 goals that are red, red, and orange, each of which is very hard or impossible to increase by >1 unit per day, and which have rates of 5 units per week, 6 units per week, and 3 units per week (weekdays only), respectively. In addition to these, I have 2 more goals which frequently go red and for which the realistic amount of safety buffer I can get in one day is >1 day but <2.5 days (where 1 day would be “treading water”), as well as 2 more goals which meet the same description except for the “frequently go red” part.

I like the idea of this “all green” goal, but can anyone suggest a way to make it work for me with these goals? It’s way too scary to commit to literally “all green” when having 6 red+orange goals is not infrequent for me, and some of these goals would take weeks to go green even at maximal effort.

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@kenoubi, I have three goals that are 7 units a week, and I got them into the green last Friday by doubling up. That strategy works well when it makes sense to double up—for example, studying topology for 2x30 minutes actively contributes to my goal. It sounds like doubling up in one day doesn’t make sense for your goals, however. In that case, @dreev’s suggestion would be the way to go:

Of course, if you subsequently miss a day (unexpected stuff happens, you get sick, …) then you’d have to explicitly schedule another flat spot to be able to get these goals back into the green.

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I don’t really like the flat spot idea because that would get my goals green, but it wouldn’t get me in the habit of keeping them green. Right now I treat red as must do (I don’t actually derail that often), orange as advisory, and blue or less as irrelevant.

I think I need to change that for all green to be a useful goal, but I don’t think I can change it all at once. So what I think I need is a goal that rewards me for progress towards all green (or staying there, if I already am). I’m struggling to figure out how to quantify that usefully, though.

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Experimental proposal: On any day where you have done the maximum amount possible to do on every goal that is not in the green but still have some goals not in the green, you can record half a point. This will guarantee you can never be forced to derail but will encourage you to actually get it to the all green point so you can do more than tread water.

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I think if I weaken that a tad more, I can make it work. Something like “on every day on which I increase the safety buffer (even by less than a day, but more than the daily rate) on every goal that is not green and not incorrectly colored (see What do the colors actually mean?), score 1/2 point”. Though the rate clearly needs to be less than 1/day, also.

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Update: now that I’ve upgraded to Bee Plus and have the Weekends Off feature, I’ve archived my All Green goal.

It was an excellent goal for the ~6 weeks I had it. After the first three weeks, I managed to get four all-green days in a row, which gave me almost a month of buffer. That felt really gratifying.

Now that I have Bee Plus, however, the underlying benefit of All Green is provided by the Weekends Off feature. I also find that, nice as it is not to have eep days, the red-orange-blue color coding actually works pretty well for me in prioritizing what I want to do each day.

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I actually prefer the all green goal to weekends off for most things, and only use weekends off for things where I either can’t or really don’t want to work on them on the weekends (e.g. my gym is pleasantly empty on weekdays and very busy on weekends, so I have that as a weekends off goal).

The rest is mostly stuff where I don’t really mind it sliding back and forth across the week and actually appreciate the cycle of being forced to occasionally push out some buffer through manual effort.

I mostly just keep things green for a day or two though., I don’t think I’ve done more than three days in a row.

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Oh, one update on this goal: I changed the fine print from “all goals must be green” to “all goals must have at least three days of safety buffer” (I kept the name). I don’t find the cases where yellow/blue/green differ but have more than 3 days at all intuitive or particularly useful, so it was easier to just reinterpret the goal.

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It’s just a bug according to @dreev. See What do the colors actually mean? - #8 by dreev.

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Fair enough, in that case I definitely feel OK doing this!

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Behold! Is it not a thing of beauty?

I have so many goals that getting them all green is a Really Big Deal for me. As in, historically I probably only manage it once every 6 months or so. I’m contemplating setting up an “all green” meta-goal, but still on the fence about whether it would be worth it. (And if you’re wondering, the reason I am all green now is that I have been getting up super early this week to have uninterrupted time to work on some Important Things, but then procrastinating by working on beeminder goals instead.)

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Oh delicious irony! But why aren’t you beeminding the Important Things??

)[quote=“dreev, post:29, topic:2497”]
But why aren’t you beeminding the Important Things??
[/quote]

Oh, I am, but I (felt as though I) had to do more of it this week than the average amount that I beemind per week. (In fact Important Thing = grading student papers.) Grading is kind of awkward for beeminding actually, since the amount I have to do varies quite a bit from week to week. (But it’s still way better than not beeminding it at all.)

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I’ve just run into an interesting perverse incentive (which I haven’t succumbed to yet, though I’m not ruling out that I may).

Under certain circumstances this goal can provide you with an incentive to derail on other goals: If I have a goal that may derail today that I do not think it is feasible to push out into the future and I can see that my all green goal becomes due tomorrow, if the all green goal has more money riding on it than the goal that would derail today, I might want to let today’s goal derail so that I can get the safety buffer that comes with it (even on a no mercy goal this may be true - no mercy is still relatively merciful).

All told, I think I’ve decided that this goal is annoying me more than it’s helping me, so I’ve just pressed archive. I liked a lot of what it did, but I think it’s not quite the right structure.

A thing I’ve been trying to do recently when advance plannign for this goal which seems generally helpful is to minimize the number of beeminder goals that become due on the same day (regardless of when that day is). I may look into whether it’s worth replacing the allgreen goal with a modified one that encourages me to do that.

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Your 9Green idea has been SO useful for me.

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Yay! So glad to hear it!

Just seeing this thanks to today’s forum activity, and I’m excited to give it a try. To ease in, I’m going to start with an “All blue” goal, to be archived and replaced with an “all green” when achieved.

This is worth a bump: It’s not only a win for newbies, it also promotes Beeminder revenue indirectly (by promoting usage).

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Heh… that said, I suppose a tradeoff to consider is that it might also breed resentment in some newbies who feel burned by it.

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Update: I achieved my “All blue” goal after just two full days of activity, which is evidence that the positive / fun motivation of chasing green works for me better than the negative motivation of avoiding eeps and fines, as it has for others.

(If also makes me wonder if that was too easy and evidence that I should be Beemining 2x or 3x more things than I am…)

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