Is there a tried-and-trusted way to create a goal where I’ll only be expected to perform on weekdays?
Would a do-more goal set to 5x/week, with no-weekends turned on, be enough?
1 Like
Hi! Thanks for asking; it’s always useful to hear about what people are having difficulty with.
That will almost work, if you’re planning to do a do-more goal that only ever enters positive data. That way your rate will always be 0 on Saturdays and Sundays. But you’d want to set the rate to 1 unit per day, not 5/7 units per day; if you have a 5/7 per day (i.e. your suggested 5/week) rate, then you won’t actually even have to do 5 units in the week.
There are a couple of edge cases where you could end up having to add data on a do-more graph with weekends off. The ones I can think of are if you ratchet to 0 on Saturday or Sunday or if you add negative data at any point. I think that’s it – nothing that comes up in most standard use cases.
Out of curiosity, is there a reason you thought that wouldn’t work? Like something you’ve experienced before that was weird or confusing, or something in the documentation? It’d be great to dig in there – thanks again for mentioning you weren’t sure here!
Well, and it’s def a buried issue by now, but I still try to always keep my goals ‘green’, so this stuff with the weekends is already ‘broken’ in terms of that use case / behaviour. But that’s a separate issue.
I guess yeah I hadn’t considered that I had to set it to 1x/day vs 5x/week. That already was a good pointer!
And can I start this at any point during the week? (Sorry if this question seems a bit weird, but I think I still get confused by that).
I’m not sure quite what you mean by that, actually! I also try to keep my goals in the green, and adding two days of flat spot for the weekend each week increases my safety buffer correctly. E.g. my goal is at 7 days to derailment normally; over the weekend it’s at 9 days on Saturday, 8 days on Sunday, and back at 7 on Monday. How would you be expecting it to work there?
(It can sometimes look weird on Friday because the next weekend hasn’t been scheduled yet, but once it is, you have the correct number of safe days again on Monday.)
And yep, you can start at any time during the week – when you first turn weekends off on, it schedules the upcoming weekend even if that’s within the akrasia horizon.
1 Like
W/r/t the green thing: I like to have the colours to prompt me to take action. So I’ll only work on a goal if it goes out of green. But with the way weekends-off works, I have to remember to take action on those goals during the week since the goals won’t start changing colour until I hit the weekend (if that makes sense).
So the unfortunate reality for me is that I have a fair few goals which are ‘no-weekends’, but I always end up doing them on the weekend because I miss the cue of the green turning blue as the signal that I should work on them.
Like today, for example. I have a weekends-off goal which I created as per the suggestions above, but it’s green today, so I don’t think to work on it, but then it will turn blue over the weekend, when I explicitly don’t want to work on it 