Experimental proposal: On any day where you have done the maximum amount possible to do on every goal that is not in the green but still have some goals not in the green, you can record half a point. This will guarantee you can never be forced to derail but will encourage you to actually get it to the all green point so you can do more than tread water.
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I think if I weaken that a tad more, I can make it work. Something like āon every day on which I increase the safety buffer (even by less than a day, but more than the daily rate) on every goal that is not green and not incorrectly colored (see What do the colors actually mean?), score 1/2 pointā. Though the rate clearly needs to be less than 1/day, also.
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Update: now that Iāve upgraded to Bee Plus and have the Weekends Off feature, Iāve archived my All Green goal.
It was an excellent goal for the ~6 weeks I had it. After the first three weeks, I managed to get four all-green days in a row, which gave me almost a month of buffer. That felt really gratifying.
Now that I have Bee Plus, however, the underlying benefit of All Green is provided by the Weekends Off feature. I also find that, nice as it is not to have eep days, the red-orange-blue color coding actually works pretty well for me in prioritizing what I want to do each day.
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I actually prefer the all green goal to weekends off for most things, and only use weekends off for things where I either canāt or really donāt want to work on them on the weekends (e.g. my gym is pleasantly empty on weekdays and very busy on weekends, so I have that as a weekends off goal).
The rest is mostly stuff where I donāt really mind it sliding back and forth across the week and actually appreciate the cycle of being forced to occasionally push out some buffer through manual effort.
I mostly just keep things green for a day or two though., I donāt think Iāve done more than three days in a row.
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Oh, one update on this goal: I changed the fine print from āall goals must be greenā to āall goals must have at least three days of safety bufferā (I kept the name). I donāt find the cases where yellow/blue/green differ but have more than 3 days at all intuitive or particularly useful, so it was easier to just reinterpret the goal.
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Fair enough, in that case I definitely feel OK doing this!
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Behold! Is it not a thing of beauty?
I have so many goals that getting them all green is a Really Big Deal for me. As in, historically I probably only manage it once every 6 months or so. Iām contemplating setting up an āall greenā meta-goal, but still on the fence about whether it would be worth it. (And if youāre wondering, the reason I am all green now is that I have been getting up super early this week to have uninterrupted time to work on some Important Things, but then procrastinating by working on beeminder goals instead.)
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Oh delicious irony! But why arenāt you beeminding the Important Things??
)[quote=ādreev, post:29, topic:2497ā]
But why arenāt you beeminding the Important Things??
[/quote]
Oh, I am, but I (felt as though I) had to do more of it this week than the average amount that I beemind per week. (In fact Important Thing = grading student papers.) Grading is kind of awkward for beeminding actually, since the amount I have to do varies quite a bit from week to week. (But itās still way better than not beeminding it at all.)
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Iāve just run into an interesting perverse incentive (which I havenāt succumbed to yet, though Iām not ruling out that I may).
Under certain circumstances this goal can provide you with an incentive to derail on other goals: If I have a goal that may derail today that I do not think it is feasible to push out into the future and I can see that my all green goal becomes due tomorrow, if the all green goal has more money riding on it than the goal that would derail today, I might want to let todayās goal derail so that I can get the safety buffer that comes with it (even on a no mercy goal this may be true - no mercy is still relatively merciful).
All told, I think Iāve decided that this goal is annoying me more than itās helping me, so Iāve just pressed archive. I liked a lot of what it did, but I think itās not quite the right structure.
A thing Iāve been trying to do recently when advance plannign for this goal which seems generally helpful is to minimize the number of beeminder goals that become due on the same day (regardless of when that day is). I may look into whether itās worth replacing the allgreen goal with a modified one that encourages me to do that.
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Your 9Green idea has been SO useful for me.
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Yay! So glad to hear it!
Just seeing this thanks to todayās forum activity, and Iām excited to give it a try. To ease in, Iām going to start with an āAll blueā goal, to be archived and replaced with an āall greenā when achieved.
This is worth a bump: Itās not only a win for newbies, it also promotes Beeminder revenue indirectly (by promoting usage).
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Hehā¦ that said, I suppose a tradeoff to consider is that it might also breed resentment in some newbies who feel burned by it.
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Update: I achieved my āAll blueā goal after just two full days of activity, which is evidence that the positive / fun motivation of chasing green works for me better than the negative motivation of avoiding eeps and fines, as it has for others.
(If also makes me wonder if that was too easy and evidence that I should be Beemining 2x or 3x more things than I amā¦)
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[edited for typos]
Update: Iāve archived my all-green goal.
What I liked about it:
- It removed Beeminder-induced stress by changing my goal from not derailing to having 2+ days of buffer, which increased peace of mind
- It made Beeminding more fun. As others pointed out, it lent more of a feeling of accomplishing something positive, instead of just maintaining a state of non-crisis.
What didnāt work for me:
- Beeminderās iOS client and web app are both designed (as they should be) with UI to make it clear when you will derail, and what you need to do to avoid derailing. Their UIs donāt make it very clear when you will slip from green to blue, or what you need to do to avoid that. For this reason I found that staying on track for this goal required more effort than it was worth. Iām not even sure itās possible to [edit:] reliably know exactly whatās required to maintain green buffer in some cases. ā¦which segues to:
- I found that certain types of goals were incompatible with this, either in spirit or technically.
- Exhibit A: I made an exception for my weight loss goal (somewhat reluctantly), on the grounds that it wasnāt sufficiently under my control to stay in the green. I still feel a bit conflicted about whether this was appropriate.
- Exhibit B: The way I used my drink-less-alcohol goal (if, when wanting a drink, I can afford to have one without derailing, then go ahead) exempted it from this, especially since the UI didnāt allow me to plan ahead to build up a reliable buffer and make decisions about whether to drink on the margin of green/blue instead of ontrack/derail.
This goal was useful for me to develop a habit of āshooting for greenā, which I will carry with me. I do think itās worth trying this kind of goal out for a while, just to get this benefit. Itās a subtle but powerful difference in the way I Beemind.
If at some point I find Iāve gotten out of that habit, I might unarchive this goal for a month or two to restart it.
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Yeah, this was also my experience. Iām glad I did the goal for a while, but Iām also glad I stopped doing it after I acquired the habit.
Since stopping Iāve found that I started skating a bit on some goals but have gotten much better at keeping on top of things and od tend to push most goals further than a day or two back when I work on them.
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Iām joining the all-green meta goal experiment using this custom goal:
https://www.beeminder.com/narthur/buffer#data
Itās using the max aggregator with non-cumulative data points. Iām using a cron job to periodically post data points to it with the value being equal to the lowest lane value of all my goals (excluding /buffer itself) multiplied by each goalās yaw.
The goalās slope combined with non-cumulative data points means that Iāll need to increase my buffer over time until I reach the point where every goal is above the road.
Using lanes like this means the changes in required buffer are probably going to happen in sudden jumps instead of a gradual climbāI think Iād need to base the goal on days of buffer instead of lanes to avoid this. Not sure I made the right decision here, but Iāll give it some time before I decide to change itā¦
Weāll see how it goesā¦ 
EDIT: The more I thought about it, the more using lanes just didnāt feel like the right choice. Iāve modified the script to use days of buffer instead of lane numbers, which should make the goal work much better since it will enforce a gradual change in my behavior instead of stair-stepped mega beemergencies.
Also, with this approach I should be able to schedule breaks by setting the rate to -1 (losing one day of buffer per day), which, after Iāve built up enough buffer in all my goals, could mean Iāve accidentally built myself the one-vacation-dialer-to-rule-them-all featureā¦
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This sounds very cool - can I see your script?