Beeminder not practical for inconsistent studying, solution?

Hey I’m new to Beeminder,

I really enjoyed using the App/System so far, I encountered some problems with it though, here the scenario:

I set 10 hours to study as a goal (for a specific subject), normally I spread these 10 hours over two days at the end of the week.

Beeminder wants to punish me if I don’t commit to the graph, which is impossible as I don’ work consistently on this subject. Do you have any solution to my problem? I’ d really like to continue using Beeminder.

Best,
Koyaan

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@koyaan94:

Welcome to the community! Luckily not all is lost. Your best solution is probably a tool made by @enolan called Beescheduler.

In his own words: “Beescheduler lets you schedule different rates for your Beeminder goals based on the days of the week. I wrote it so I could focus on one project Monday - Wednesday and different ones on Thursday and Friday. This is much better than doing a tiny amount on all of them every day.”

Here is a link to the tool: https://beescheduler.echonolan.net/
Here is a link to the original forum post: Beescheduler - Schedule goals by the day of the week

This should allow you to schedule your 10 hours over just Friday and Saturday. If that doesn’t work please post back. There might be another way to do this.

Major bonus points to @cgamer1 for knowing about things like Beescheduler (and even bigger bonus points to @enolan for creating it!) but, especially for other newbees, I think we should first make sure the standard solution for plain old Beeminder isn’t enough.

Namely, you should start the goal with a week of safety buffer so that it’s ok to put in all 10 hours at the end of the week. More on that:

(Actually, I think that last link is subsumed by the first two. Hugely valuable for us to get questions about this kind of thing, btw! We really need to make all this more immediately obvious in the interface so you don’t have to read articles to understand it! :))

PS: If your reaction to this is “well, crap, I now see I should’ve started with a week of safety buffer but it’s too late now” then just email support@beeminder.com and point to this forum thread and we’ll just add it for you retroactively. Or if you really don’t want to email support (even though it’s super painless, we promise!) you could also schedule a week of flat spot in your yellow brick road (“Take A Break” in the Stop/Pause tab below the graph) and then you have to struggle through for another week but then you’ll have that week of safety buffer and from then on will have the flexibility to do the week’s work all on Friday or whenever works for you.

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