Thanks so much for asking this; I should’ve posted to the forum by now! Let me start by repeating the daily beemail about it from Friday when we did this:
Continuous beeminding and the glorious future (also death to weekly rates)
I was pretty encouraged when looking at some old notes today. A thing that used to sound like preposterously speculative theoretical sky pie now feels pretty obvious and natural. We’re absolutely going to get there. Before I get to that, let me tell you about what Bee’s throwing together as I write this beemail…
Nicky’s been beeseeching us for a long time to address the onboarding nightmare that is people creating what they think of as weekly goals.
What’s the problem with weekly goals, you veterans blithely ask? It’s that despite being able to specify a commitment as “4 per week”, there is no such thing as a weekly goal the way users expect. Beeminder treats everything as fundamentally daily. Namely, “X per week” just means “X/7 per day”.
Our solution (what Bee may well deploy by the time you see this!) is that we’re killing the daily/weekly/monthly dropdown in goal creation. Only daily rates allowed! But don’t panic. Under the daily rate field is a button, “commit per week”. When pressed it pops up a popup:
Warning! Weekly goals in Beeminder are not what you may expect. In a sense, Beeminder only supports daily goals. For a weekly (or monthly) goal, you need to do two things:
Convert it to a daily rate. If you want to do something 4 times per week, enter “4/7” per day. Beeminder speaks fractions.
Choose at least a week of initial safety buffer. If you pick 4/7 as your daily rate but no buffer, Beeminder will expect you to do 0.571429 things tomorrow.
What do you think?
There are better ways to address this. Like letting you give a weekly rate and dynamically showing the daily rate that that equates to. As we were designing that we got excited about some kind of datepicker so we can be crystal clear about when your first beemergency day will be when you create a goal. But we decided this is a moneyfire that we have to put out today. So non-daily-rates-verboten it is.
More fundamentally, it would be amazing to actually support weekly goals the way users expect (even though they’re usually wrong to want that). I’m imagining the Glorious Future where Beeminder supports any deadline frequency you want, by making the bright red line a staircase. The status quo is that the red line conceptually has 24-hour flat spots every day, jumping up at your daily deadline. A true weekly goal would be the equivalent with week-long flat spots. I’m excited about the other extreme – a work goal where I have a beemergency every hour during the work day, 9am-5pm, and then flat the rest of the time. I’m also weird enough to like the idea of fully continuous goals. Like there’s no fixed deadline at all, you just get some amount above the red line and that defines exactly how long till you next collide with the line. If you want to be able to get a full night’s sleep, you better do enough work to buy yourself 8 hours of safety buffer. It’ll be great.
But the real point is that ideally it’s fully flexible and general, while ironically having fewer moving parts. Weekends-off would just be one more special case of the Bright Red Staircase approach.
Back to the Unglorious Present, the problem we’re scrambling to fix is our failure to convey to users – without sending them off to a help page like “How do I tell Beeminder what day my week starts?”, nice as that is – that when they say “per week” they’re not getting a one-deadline-per-week goal. A frightening fraction of people who pick “per week” when specifying the rate --which, anguished-wail, has been the default till now – Beeminder seems to them like it’s just broken, and they walk away in disgust.
But no longer! I spent so much time writing this that Bee has deployed the new hotness. Go to beeminder.com/new and check it out!
UPDATE: The part about the Bright Red Staircase is now a blog post!