Today’s Advent Calendar post reveals a way to make a goal red immediately without permanently losing any of its safety buffer.
Pessimistic presumption is officially a feature of Do Less goals, however it works with other goal types too. To use it:
- Enter a datapoint that has any value (positive or negative).
- Include a comment that contains #SELFDESTRUCT
- must be uppercase
- must have the # mark
- can be by itself or have any words around it
- spaces on either side are not needed (e.g., aaaa#SELFDESTRUCTaaa works)
- You’ll see the datapoint appear on your graph as normal.
- Later in the day, enter your real datapoint for that goal.
- You’ll see that the pessimistic presumption datapoint is automatically deleted.
How is this useful? Well say you have a Do More goal that you’ve worked hard to get to green and you want to keep your safety buffer, but you also want to force yourself to make more progress on the goal today. Enter a pessimistic presumption (PP) datapoint with a large negative value, and you’ll see the graph go red immediately. Then do some work on the goal and enter a new datapoint. Your goal goes back to green straight away, with a larger safety buffer, and with the PP datapoint deleted.
The exact value of the PP datapoint isn’t important, as long as its enough to change the colour of your graph. I usually use -99 because it’s easy to enter and guaranteed to make any of my goals red.
When you enter a real datapoint for the goal, it doesn’t have to match the PP datapoint (e.g., you don’t need to enter +99). Any value will cause the PP datapoint to disappear.
I use this because I love seeing many of my goals green at the end of the day but I find it hard to motivate myself to work on a goal if it’s not red. Of course there’s nothing stopping me from manually deleting the PP datapoint at the end of the day, and sometimes I do that without guilt (especially if it’s been a really busy day) but usually this trick makes me actually work on the goal.
You can enter a PP datapoint for a future day too! For example, if I wanted to encourage myself to work on a goal tomorrow, I’d enter a PP datapoint with tomorrow’s date. It wouldn’t have any effect on the goal colour today (and wouldn’t cause it to derail today), but when I wake up the next morning, the goal is red and begging for attention. 
This doesn’t work well with goals where you’d typically enter multiple datapoints each day, because as soon as the first datapoint goes in, the PP datapoint is deleted. For those goals, I’ll sometimes enter a negative datapoint with the comment “DELETE” and then manually remove it later.
