Hi,
I am a newbie (newBee) and I have set a daily target of not exceeding 30 minutes on social media through rescuetime. But I see an issue here, if I use social media for 5 minutes today, it says I can use 55 minutes for next 2 days which kind of doesn’t serve the purpose. Can anyone help me in simple terms how do I set my 30 minutes hard limit everyday and not transfer the unused time to next day limit?
You have options. But curious: have you considered reducing the rate such that building up buffer wouldn’t be such an issue? Like 10 minutes a day so that after three days of nothing you’d have 30 minutes built up?
I was looking for an option that doesn’t let the unused time get accumulated for the next day. Can you please guide me on that? Regarding your query, I was looking for a hard limit on a daily basis.
Auto-retroratcheting to 0.5 would do what you want, but it is a paid feature.
Side note: what happened to the discussion about making this feature free/available on a lower paid tier?
Still something under discussion! I’ve been gathering opinions via user feedback, and it’s all looking pretty convincing, but there are some concerns about how best to implement it (e.g. should we completely flip things so you have to pay to be able to keep safety buffer? or just make the existing feature more available? – I have opinions on this, but here I’m just saying that that’s a concern to figure out before we make changes).
I paid for BeePlus but I still have not understood how to do it.
Ah, thanks for mentioning you were having trouble finding it. Did you try checking the help docs at all? If the page wasn’t helpful, that’d be really useful to hear – if not, if you could glance at it and let us know whether it answers your questions, that’d also be really helpful!
Here’s the link – it should jump you directly to the section about how to set up autoratchet. 
The short version though is that the option for autoratchet is under the “commitment” tab, on each goal’s page. So you’d want to go there and set the maximum number of days of buffer you’d like to be allowed. If you never want to be allowed a day off, you’d set it to 0, and then each day at your deadline Beeminder will check whether you have buffer or not, and ratchet if you do.
Does that all make sense now?
oh, I think I missunderstood something here. Thought this tread is about how the data not exceeds a daily limit. So if my goal is to run 10 minutes each day and I run 15 minutes on one day I still want to have 10 minutes of running as a goal on the next day and not 5 minutes because I already did 15 on the day before.
Ah, that’s a situation where autoratchet won’t help, because you won’t have built up an extra full day of buffer. It’d work if you’d done 20 minutes instead of 10, because that’s a full extra day of buffer.
In cases like that, custom goals with aggregation methods like “skatesum” would do what you want, but just bear in mind that custom aggregation methods can sometimes have weird side effects.
Mostly Beeminder is (intentionally) set up for the use-case that it doesn’t matter how much you do on a given day, only that you do a certain amount of something on average, so there isn’t any one bulletproof way to set things up to work differently.
for me personally, it is just the thing of sticking to the habit. If I have to do 10 seconds of running today because I already did 19:50 the other day, it will not really lead to me sticking to that habit. I just hit the track button on my watch and after 10 seconds I can let it be. I am really suprised and sad that this isn’t an optional feature. But I will just look into skatesum and see what I can do
Usually for that kind of goal, where what really matters is that I do some every day, I’d just set up a manual Do More goal and add +1 for each day I do my minimum amount.
In the end, Beeminder isn’t really concerned with “streaks” (which seems to be more in line with what you want), so we don’t support them explicitly – if the workarounds aren’t satisfying, there are a bunch of Beeminder competitors that might have something more like that, which you could use instead of/as well as Beeminder.
Slightly tangentially, we did recently get permission to repost a classic blog post in praise of the cumulative graphs, which also touches on why streaks can be de-motivating, which is worth a read!
thank you very much for recommending “skatesum”. it is working great. I think it is exactly what I am looking for. Of course one could also display maybe the individual data entries. Is this somehow possible? That it adds the individual data entries but still sets +10 as the goal for the next day? I should maybe start reading all the great articles,websites, links instead of taking your time 
concerning streaks: I mean the cumulative graph is also a streak I would say. I want to really have all of the data entries in a line and a derail just looks really bad. So I think it does both jobs pretty well, it shows a streak and it also has the benefits of the article you linked.
The +10 minutes every day is is pretty similiar to your +1 but gives me a higher goal. I need to let my timer run 10 minutes instead of one or just entering a +1 for a do more. I think it would just be to easy for me to add the entry and lie to myself. Instead the 10 minutes every day really force me to start my timer on my watch and going for a run or other task. It just feels worse letting a timer run 10 minutes while doing nothing instead of entering a quick +1 to lie to myself
Skatesum was working really amazing but then I realised that when you are not near your data but above it does not ratchet the amount. So I looked at cap1 now. Is it possible to ratchet it everyday at a value other than 1? How do I set this up?
I’m not sure what you mean here. Skatesum will always only allow you your current rate. If you add +50 and your daily rate is +10, only +10 will count. Maybe you mean your data is above the bright red line?
If you had buffer already, or gained buffer some other way (like a break or the respite from a derailment), it won’t do anything about it because it’s not actually a ratchet – that’s a specific term with a completely different meaning. But you can use ratcheting and skatesum together, if you wish; if you have buffer, you could just use a ratchet once to get rid of it (make sure you do that before you add any data for the day), and then skatesum will ensure you can’t gain any buffer by overachieving.
Skatesum and cap1 are almost exactly the same thing. Skatesum caps you at your daily rate, cap1 caps you at 1. So if skatesum isn’t working for you for some reason, cap1 won’t either.
And of course, if you never want to get any buffer, make sure you set your post-derail respite to 0.