Can anyone help me understand what's going on here?

Bugabee
1

Ok, so I have this goal with a rate of 0.8 per day, and I was in the green (or at least blue) a few days ago. I dutifully entered a datapoint every day for the last 11 days (except for one day). I didn’t mess up with the red line in any way (apart from the “weekends off” setting). So, how it’s even possible that I’m in the red now???

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Hmm. Did you by chance auto-ratchet your goal or use the ratchet feature manually? Those vertical shifts look like ratcheting to me, and perhaps it’s that combined with weekends off that’s resulted in the issue.

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Ah, of course I have autoratchet on (on almost every goal, in fact). But why would it matter? I know that autoratcheting + weekends off are broken for do-less goals, but I had no idea that they have issues for do-more goals, too…

Also, I can’t remember this happening before for do-more goals…

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What’s your rate? It’s not immediately obvious from the public view. Is it daily, weekly? nvm I see you already said 0.8 / day. :sweat_smile:

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Wrote a long comment here with rhetorical questions but then it dawned on me that I have seen instances like this. This is, indeed, because auto-ratchet and weekends-off work weirdly together. Because of the weekends-off, the autorathet thinks you have a lot of buffer even if you are in the orange on Friday. So it ratchets to the maximum possible amount, putting you in the red. I guess this observation is another point in favor of the idea that buffer should be calculated vertically, not horizontally.

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6

There’s an excellent blog post which Bethany wrote, which explains what should be happening when you use ratcheting with breaks, including weekends-off, for do-more goals: Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses "Ratcheting Breaks Breaks" Bug | Beeminder Blog (Skip to near the end if you’re just interested in what happens with autoratchet and weekends-off)

It gets into the weeds at times, but actually you kinda need to get into the weeds to understand some of the design decisions. If you are seeing behaviour that doesn’t match with what this post is saying, then definitely shout, as it may well be a bug!

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