This started as a question to support but I eventually decided the forum might be a good place for this too:
I am not perfectly happy with the akrasia horizon being 1 week. From what I found it stems from this blog post in 2011:
where it says:
Based on thus-far scant evidence, we’re treating one week as the universal akrasia horizon.
I challenge this notion. I don’t feel my akrasia is well represented by this. It might be because of my goals not being “walk 10000 steps a day” or “climb 11 flights of stairs each day” and so on but more time-based goals that can not be suffered through so “easily”.
For those goals I think I would prefer something like 2 or 3 days. Where does this come from? Personal experience, gut feeling and my University which has a 3 day akrasia horizon when it comes to cancelling your registration for a written exam.
In the past I found that this resonates a lot more with me. Now this might just be me and me being a student and thus having a far less regular week than someone with a 40hrs 9-5 job but that’s also my point. I am not happy with this universal akrasia horizon. But it’s been there for 8 years now and a brief search in the forums did not reveal any major outbursts of protest so maybe it really is just me?
What if the akrasia horizon was a per-goal setting that itself couldn’t be changed until the end of the current horizon?
One reason I don’t like the idea is that right now it’s pretty straight-forward to know how often I need to beetune since every goal has the same horizon. Allowing it to be tampered with could make things a lot more complicated.
My main gripe with Akrasia is that I often fall sick (chronic illness etc) and then all my goals fail. There’s no way for Beeminder really to work in the way I need for when I’m sick vs when I’m feeling better. It doesn’t have the flexibility to accommodate these big shifts.
I want to register one more case against “single horizon fits all” - in my case short term Akrasia is significant, but there is no significant difference between “two days in the future” and “two years in the future”.
I also relatively often have unexpected things that require break for some of my goals. I know that I can email support, but I feel a bit stupid sending third email in month requesting an emergency break. This time it will be “I have a holiday trip planned for a year and only now I remembered that I should set break on /work goal”.
In my case allowing me to reduce horizon to three or four days would allow me to reduce how many times I email support.
Hopefully posting in old topic is better than creating new one (I see “Revive this topic?” on the right but it has no advice whatever I should rather create a duplicate).