Auto-rachet with weekends-off doesn't work how I expect

[katriel]

I have a maximum of 1 day of safety buffer set in the auto-rachet for a goal (number of pomodoros completed). I also have weekends-off. When I go crazy on Friday and blast past my goal, I would expect to be safe on Monday. But the weekend-off eats the 1 day of safety buffer and Monday is always an eep-day.

Is this the intended behavior? If so, I’d like to propose revising the design.

I see some earlier discussion at the following links but they’re pretty old:

What are the technical reasons for the incompatibility between autoratcheting and weekends off?

I realize the simple reason is that auto-ratcheting advances your road to the left, thereby moving the weekend breaks. (Does this also happen for manually-added breaks?) But why couldn’t the road be moved up instead of to the left? If this currently affects user-scheduled breaks as well as automatic weekend breaks, would this ever be what the user wanted? When I schedule breaks, it’s because I want a break between those specific dates, and even if I retro-ratchet I really don’t want that to cha…

What happens when you combine weekends off with auto-capping?

It says it won’t play nicely but what does that mean? Currently, with weekends off if I do the bare minimum on friday then it stil displays as two days safe, and if I did one day more than that it would say three. What if I had auto-capping set to two? Would it explode, trying to make me fail on a day off or would it just mean that I would be in the red on monday, or some other third thing? (what I actually would prefer is if just put me in the red on monday. I just want to be incapable of act…

[shanaqui]

Hi! Thanks for sharing – always useful to hear this kind of question.

Weekends off are no different from other breaks, which are no different any other buffer you gain except that a flat spot itself will not be ratcheted. There’s no way I can think of for distinguishing between “you have buffer because you had a period with a rate of 0/day” (other than the period with the flat spot itself) and “you have buffer because you’ve overachieved”.

So because any buffer you have before the weekend is not a flat spot, it can be ratcheted (and is).

So I wouldn’t say it’s exactly intended behaviour, but it’s also not surprising behaviour, and I’m actually not sure how we could easily change it – if anyone has any thoughts, it’d be good to hear.

I think the way proposed in the past has been true breaks, where the bright red line just stops existing for the weekend. Personally, I’m not sure how that would work in other ways (does the goal functionally not exist? can you enter data? should you be able to? is it quantified self if you can’t enter data? but if you can enter data, the graph needs to be plotting it somehow…) so I’m not a huge fan, butit’s something that’s been mooted as a good move for various reasons.

[katriel]

Thanks for such a quick response! Personally, I would prefer to have auto-ratchet aware of breaks even if it meant I couldn’t enter data on breaks.

But I don’t really understand why, if there were no bright red line on break days, you couldn’t enter data.

[shanaqui]

To be clear (just in case it trips anyone else up) autoratchet is aware of breaks. It should never ratchet away an actual break. What you’re asking for is that it take breaks into account and ignore them when calculating how many days of buffer you have and whether it should run, if I understand correctly – is that a good summing up?

[katriel]

Yes that’s right - thanks for the clarification.