When does a goal complete?

Continuing the discussion from Remove Archive/Quit goal akrasia limit:

I’m confused by this, so I’m going to point out a couple of website features that may not be relevant to @tomjen but which may benefit future knowledge-seekers.

  1. The end date of the goal is visible on your graph page in 2 places. It’s below your graph on the Dial Road tab, and it’s the “TARGET” date underneath your picture in the Goal Progress section.

  2. You can see any upcoming changes in the road slope on the Take a Break tab below your graph. This is handy to see exactly when a flat spot is going to come to an end, or what holidays you’ve already configured.

  3. And of course, you can see the countdown to derailment just above the graph, and in the graph itself there’s a light-grey watermark that shows either the number of safe-days or the weekday of your next beemergency.

None of those may answer your question, so please chime in below. Or email suppport…

A noble sentiment, but fear not! We have a buzzing hive of worker bees that almost exclusively answer support emails. Anything that you ‘bug’ us about a) isn’t distracting the developer bees and b) is improving the community. Because we can’t improve what we don’t know is broken, and we can’t tell from inside the hive what it’s like to beemind your particular stuff.

1 Like

Beeminder is easy enough to work with - it looks like I would have designed it.

My issue isn’t with the beeminder goal - I know when that is set to end (for that particular goal: 1th of may 2016). I also know exactly how many hours I have set aside each week.

What I don’t know is how many hours it will take to actually complete the goal - it takes very roughly 3 hours on average to work through one lesson right now and there are about 3 and some change lessons left on my course. This means the goal is about 12-15 hours out, but it could be shorter or longer if the final lessons take more or less time. It almost certainly isn’t going to take the 150 hours beeminder has left.

The trouble is that I might set a deadline when I have 3 hours left, finish the course in 2 hours and 20 minutes - and then what? I don’t want to add fake data, it is certainly not a derailment, but until now I sorta didn’t know what to do.

1 Like

Sounds as though ‘hours’ might not be the right measure for this goal, since you’re counting lessons. Especially if it makes sense to enter 0.5 for getting half-way through a lesson (or some equivalent increment of progress).

I’ve had success with creating 2 Beeminder goals that are related to a single real-world goal; one to ensure that I spend time working on lessons, and one to ensure that I’m progressing through the lessons themselves.