Sorry, guys, for the long delay. I think some good points have been raised.
First of all, I wouldn’t consider Essy’s suggestion a solution – perhaps a
workaround, but a quite inconvenient one at that, since we’d have to
continually adjust our graphs. I have (and I believe many chronic
procrastinators have as well) been a victim of overplanning and overplaying
with my task sceduling tools in the past, and I don’t think Beeminder
should encourage that.
Second, I agree that displaying past “checkpoints” in the graph will
clutter it unnecessarily. Still, I’m sure we can find a way to have
information on past progress available without such problems. For example,
a site called boincstats.com (for the distributed computing platform) shows
stats such as most productive day, recent average progress, etc. Beeminder
could have a “longest in-the-road streak”, as well as stats similar to
those I mentioned. For all of these, it would be easy to filter the values
for time period (last week, last month, all time, etc). A simple stats
table in the settings page (say, a new “stats” tab) could provide this. It
should also be fairly easy to extend these stats from only showing maximum
values to also include averages such as the median, mean or mode. But these
are only suggestions for completeness; I’m aware that showing too much data
to the user may compromise its potential for generating insight. Options to
alleviate this could be de-emphasising the extra data, perhaps by using a
smaller font, fainter colors, or placing the values in a tooltip.
Finally, Brian’s remark combined with the fact that habit formation periods
vary wildly due to many factors, would suggest that indeed showing a
fixed-length period as a target in the graph wouldn’t be ideal. But the
measures I described above would likely be a good --dare I say, better–
substitute. So a graph could have, say, a vertical line placed at the
median length of a streak (starting from the start of the current streak,
so it doesn’t slide continuously), showing a period for which, by
definition, we are likely to be able to make a continuous streak, and a
horizontal line, intersecting it, at the median value we have accumulated
in such a period.
All of this is mostly number crunching; user-visible changes are an extra
tab in the goal settings containing a simple html table, and two extra
(optional) lines in the graph. So implementing it might be a low-effort,
high-payout effort, assuming the encouragement benefits of “achievements”
indeed as positive as I suspect. We could even go wild and show some of
those stats as badges in the userpage, as seems to be quite popular in many
sites lately 
So, what do you think?
Waldir
On Saturday, July 13, 2013 1:40:21 PM UTC+1, Brian F Crain wrote:
I, too, remember reading lots of articles about these 66 days supposedly
supported by ‘studies’. In reality that’s one single study and if I
remember correctly even there they found significant differences between
different habits.
So I don’t think there is real scientific evidence supporting 66 days, 30
days or any other number at this point.
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Daniel Reeves <dre...@beeminder.com<javascript:>
wrote:
Waldir, love the way you’re thinking and especially love Essy for
providing an immediate (though perhaps partial and inconvenient)
solution. Eager to hear if you find that Essy’s solution suffices. I
guess the main thing it’s missing is displaying previously reached
checkpoints, but I’m not convinced that’s a good idea. It’s more
complexity in the graph and just showing that you’ve been on the
yellow brick road every day is arguably even better than showing that
you reached specific past checkpoints. Besides, part of the point of
Beeminder is that every single day is such a checkpoint.
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Essentiae <esse...@gmail.com<javascript:>>
wrote:
What about using the “tmax” option (Upper bound on the plot range for
the
x-axis (latest date)") in the “Advanced” tab and setting it to 21 or 66
days
from your start point? Once you reach it, you could change the date to
your
next milestone, or delete it altogether. That way you get to see the
distance between your latest point and your milestone, as well as how
high/low your yellow brick road will be by then.
Essy
On Friday, July 12, 2013 11:04:14 AM UTC-4, Waldir Pimenta wrote:
I think most of us have already heard of the 21-day period (or other
similar lengths) purportedly needed to establish a new habit. Google’s
Matt
Cutts has a nice and short TED talk about his 30-day challenge
system[1].
Today as I looked into my graph after inputting some data, I realized
that
the fact the akrasia horizon is a moving “target” (in quotes because
it’s
not a target at all; in fact, the definition of a horizon implies that
it is
always out of reach) makes me a little anxious and I would instead
like to
see a fixed goal I could aim to (sort of a horizon in the sense used
in the
term “event horizon” for black holes, i.e. something you can actually
cross). Something like a “habit threshold”.
I decided to post here asking you about it, and having heard of the
21-day
thing, I went to look for a good link to add to my post. Interestingly
(put
perhaps not surprisingly), I found out that the 21-day habit-forming
concept
is kind of a myth. There are some interesting articles on this [2][3].
However, these articles mention how studies have revealed that while
habit-forming depends, naturally, on the habit and on the person, the
average period they recorded was 66 days. Also, they found that
missing a
day or two in that stretch wasn’t critical and didn’t require counting
to
start over.
With that said, I would suggest a new optional feature: the ability to
display the next “habit threshold” on the graph, based on the
description
above, as well as the location of such thresholds crossed in the past.
This
would provide a shorter-term sub-goal (depending on the goal length, of
course), sort of how checkpoints work in videogames, thus making it
easier
to muster the discipline to stick through especially when close to
them; I
personally find that, having set a year-long goal, I sometimes feel a
little
bit anxious looking at the road and seeing it as never-ending stairs.
Plus,
past “checkpoints” would give us pride and confidence that we can do
it —
yes, the need for self-discipline and keeping good habits is a
life-long
struggle, and it makes sense to represent it as a continually
increasing/decreasing line (depending on the goal, of course!), but a
little
encouragement may go a long way in helping us stick with our
improvement
commitments — in this case, by visualizing our goals closer to the
present
and act on them.
What do you think?
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnfBXjWm7hc
[2]
This column will change your life: How long does it really take to change a habit? | Life and style | The Guardian
[3]
http://lifehacker.com/5926583/why-habits-arent-actually-formed-in-21-days
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