Maintenance Goals

Akrasia
1

Hi folks! I have lot of Beeminder goals, and most of them are “maintenance”. I usually use Beeminder to do something, and then once I get good at it, or it is finished, I beemind keeping it good.

For instance, weight, language proficiency, inbox levels, things like that.

I’d like to inspire some discussion about maintenance goals. How many of your goals are maintenance? What sorts of things about maintenance goals are tricky on Beeminder? What parts seem like you’re fighting Beeminder? My personal pet peeve is that Beeminder doesn’t seem to like flat roads sometimes, so I have to add 0.0001 per week or something, and that sometimes the goal colors get confusing too. Also, the language around maintenance goals is sometimes hard to parse, because you’re expecting to be under this road, you’re just setting the road up as a safety net.

2 Likes
2

Gosh, categorising these was hard. Out of my current 43 goals, arguably 26 are substantially in a state of maintenance, monitoring, or acting as a backstop.

My 4 inbox zero goals feel tricky, particularly after a derailment. Those are perhaps the only ones that are flat during maintenance. Everything else has a slope and possibly the auto-ratchet max safe day set, most of them on autodata.

Anything that’s driven from external events. I’ve replaced at least one maintenance goal with a zapier trigger that adds a 24h deadline to commits.to, because the need to specify a day boundary in Beeminder was unhelpful.

2 Likes