When I first started using Beeminder, I always completed my goals long before midnight. Not before long, I was doing things at the last second. At some point, I realized that the cutoff wasn’t midnight exactly, but due to being unsure of when it actually was, I stuck with midnight or just after midnight for my data entry. However, I eventually realized the real cutoff was around 3am. These days, I do and enter things at just before 3am, which has been awful for my sleep schedule.
I’m curious: does a similar trend happen on a global scale? If you graphed time of data entry vs Xth entry since registering, would there be a visible increase?
If there’s an anonymous dataset available, I would be happy to do some ggploting myself.
So ironic that you ask this now. We would love to give people anonymized datasets (and have done so before) but at the moment we’re scrambling to make this whole question moot by Tuesday, Oct 28, when we’ve promised to announce the new arbitrary deadlines feature.
The lack of that feature has been a huge problem for Bethany and me personally. In fact, I view this as a huge leap forward for Beeminder’s overall effectiveness. As you astutely point out, with a single deadline for all goals at the end of the day, you can procrastinate all day and then scramble to dispatch your beemergencies as midnight (or 3am) bears down on you. That’s not only bad for sleep but means that Beeminder is allowing you to squander most of your working hours. The exact problem that Beeminder solves at one timescale – forcing you to break a long-term goal into small bits of daily progress – is left wholly unsolved at a timescale of hours. With per-goal settable deadlines you can have your deadlines staggered throughout the day.
In other words, Beeminder takes a big step closer to the holy grail of being a nannybot that tells you minute-by-minute what you should be doing.
An update here: you can change your deadline immediately now, up to 6am at this point. Support receives an email whenever anyone does change a deadline, just for the chance to gain knowledge about how often this is happening and how it’s working for people. If you’ve received one of these emails after changing a deadline on an emergency day, any feedback about whether it was helpful or detrimental is much appreciated!