I like to plan my goals out for the next 3 months so the default new goal deadline of 10 years means that I have to manually update each goal when I start it or when i reinstate a goal after 3 months.
Could a setting be added to the new goal defaults settings for the duration of new goals?
Thanks for suggesting this! I totally disagree with it but I love lively and reasonable disagreements and this is definitely one!
It actually really bugs me that the default is 10 years instead of being fully open-ended. Effectively open-ended goals are the norm and what we want to encourage people to create. You can always end a goal at any time by hitting archive. (For obvious commitment-related reasons there’s a one-week delay in that taking effect.)
Also I think we should be generally hesitant to implement feature requests that involve adding a new setting unless there’s a broad clamoring for it, and even then we should think hard about how to make such users happy without adding a setting.
In this case maybe lowering the friction around changing the goal date would go a long way?
I want to set a goal in beeminder to ensure that I finish all my documents on a particular program by next week. So I’d ask it to track a minimum of 6 hours of work to do in a particular program being tracked by rescuetime and reported to beeminder. My deadline is in a week so I want it hardset without the ability to archive it whenever I want.
This is the issue I have with how beeminder is set up which reflects the original post. My biggest issues in productivity are getting things done in a timely manner, especially extra things that get dumped on my schedule.
These make up the majority of my goals, but beeminder makes it difficult to use it for this. Is that on purpose?
@dreev I can understand the issues with adding a new setting. What about an option, when creating the goal that allows you to set a date?
The issue with being able to end goals early is kind of negated by the fact that you can reinstate a goal even easier.
With open ended goals I have to remember to fiddle with them to improve things. If I go for a 3 month goal I can be more aggressive with the target knowing that I can reassess how well it worked. I find that if i think about long term goals I will tend to think more conservatively.
My reason for using 90 days mostly comes from https://taylorpearson.me/planning/
Beeminder kind of barely works for things that are that short term (any less than a week and it definitely doesn’t work). Have you checked out our TaskRatchet integration? That’s focused on one-off tasks.
(Also I hate to suggest it but it’s possible StickK might work better for short-term things like that. Please report back if you try StickK! I haven’t tried it in a long time. It was pretty abysmal compared to Beeminder last time I did and I’d love to know if they’ve improved in the meantime.)
I think this is correct. I’ve been thinking for a while that we, ironically, need more friction in the goal creation process. Including your suggestion: you should be asked explicitly when creating a goal when, if ever, it should end. I don’t think the status quo is too bad, where the goal is created and you can then adjust things like the end date, but having that be part of goal creation would be better.