I’m hoping for advice here from people who have more experience than me, from using beeminder – since I’m piggybacking on beeminder’s work by going it alone with my own software based on the same ideas.
Is it important from an “akratic” point of view to prevent yourself from changing today’s data points (I’m not sure whether beeminder permits that?). If so, why? Do you find yourself tempted to “cheat” towards the end of a day?
From my limited personal experience, I don’t think I’ve yet suffered from that problem, but I’m interested to hear other people’s experiences.
Thanks!
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Beeminder always allows you to change your data points, the exception being if you’re using certain auto data integrations, which will overwrite your modifications. (Does weasel proofing change this at all?)
I’ve personally never found this to be a problem. In my mind, if you’d cheat by editing data points, you’d probably cheat by adding new fake data points, so preventing the editing wouldn’t actually prevent cheating.
Thanks – so you can edit any data point, to the “beginning of time” (of the goal)?
One reason I’ve found for wanting to give myself a little barrier to entering old points (rather than editing them), is that I have often found myself thinking “I’ll enter that data later, I can remember it”. Then some days pass, and I’ll realize I’ve not entered anything, and really my memory isn’t good enough to get it down then. The other part of that is when I think “oh it’s more important to get it entered than to be perfectly accurate”. And then I’ve got inaccurate data, possibly retrieved from an overly optimistic memory.
So for that reason I think it’s probably beneficial to to cut myself off from that up front by not allowing myself to enter data for past days.
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