I find a problem in goal creation is that you don’t have access to the above panel if you know exactly what parameters you want for the rest of your graph, especially for shorter term duration goals that run one or two weeks.
It would be useful to have this as an advanced option in goal creation to be able to get the first week’s road dialed in precisely when I know the goal date and goal total (or some other combination of inputs) so my perfectionist head isn’t bothered with my first week’s road being imperfect.
I can see how it might impact the first time experience or readability, so hiding it away as an advanced feature sounds right for maintaining the current goal creation flow if implemented.
just wanted to come here to say exactly this! (shoutout to the forum search function for letting me find this post instead of duplicating it badly!)
i just created a new goal, to go through all of @alys’ 2022 advent calendar posts until the end of june.
so goal date and goal total are perfectly clear for me: i need to finish 24 posts by june 30th. how does that translate to goal rate, though? 0.39 apparently; but i’m not number nerdy enough to care to calculate that on my own!
so what i did was put a rate of 0.1 per day in goal creation. (i had to put something, but i didn’t want to put a full 1 or other big number, among other reasons because i wouldn’t have been sure if it had let me change that to the actual smaller number right after goal creation). then immediately after goal creation i went to the above settings and input the correct date and total. it wasn’t a huge annoyance, but it did surprise me that i couldn’t find the date/total options in goal creation! (i checked back right now to see if i missed a hidden button anywhere, but i don’t think i did?)
So actually I was pretty satisfied with a decent solve that was brought up in the daily emails - you can input daily rates as fractions.
For example, google number of days until June 30th, which is 66. So since the advent calendar had 24 posts, I can simply type the daily rate as 24/66. Which is great! I might have learned it thru that advent calendar, lol. Or the daily newsletter.
thanks for mentioning this! i did actually know, in the back of my mind, that fractional inputs are an option, but, to be completely honest, researching how many days there are until june 30th feels more effort to me than just doing what i did. (inputting a low number in goal creation and then letting beeminder do the math in the settings right after.) or, maybe not more effort, but at least not decidedly less effort?
i don’t know which way actually would be slightly faster, i didn’t count the theoretical mouse-and-keyboard-clicks for either option, but i feel like, if i have to use a workaround anyway, why should i bother calculating the number of days, if i can just use the settings for that after goal creation?
also, but i should probably take this to support e-mails, 24/66 equals 0.36/day; but beeminder put my rate at 0.39/day. (or i guess it’s currently 0.4 because i’d initially misclicked and put the deadline at june 29th, but either way it’s not the 0.36 that 24/66 would have gotten me.)
ah, i guess i didn’t take into account that google would probably show the number outright. i guess i’m making my life harder by using ecosia instead of google. :p which then requires me to click on a page as well to see the number, after having to type out “how many days until xy”. (or i guess the preview text would show it, but i don’t really ever trust the preview text in these cases.)
i guess it’s more intuitive for me, if it’s a workaround either way, to input the data i know, rather than me first searching for some data i wouldn’t intuitively know and having to input that instead.
but, granted, your way might be faster despite having to type a whole string of words :p
