I would like to have a Gmail Zero Yellow Brick Road that only forces me to whittle down to zero about once a week, so that I can focus on other tasks during the rest of the week. It would likely have the shape of a sawtooth wave.
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That’s an excellent idea. I’ve got my gmail roads set to let me accumulate 10 messages, and so I do. Which means that I’m hardly ever at zero. Same with my other inbox goals.
Workaround: what if you added a goal that gets a datapoint every time your inbox is at zero?
If it were me, I’d autodata this using my dancer script and add +1 every time I see a 0 on the gmail goal. Set a slope of 1/week and retroratchet liberally. If you’re on plan bee, automate the ratcheting and set the goal to aggregate as true binary.
In an ideal world, one of the IFTTT triggers or macros would make this easy. (Or an aggregation method to invert the binary so that non-zero means zero, and zero means one.)
There are a bunch of cases which would benefit from this approach. I’m thinking of goals where the doing is triggered by an external event, and you’d like to have N days to get back to equilibrium.
My most active example is for the Beeminder blog; whenever we publish a post, I’d like to get it listed on the homepage within 24 hours. But the time of publishing is arbitrary, which doesn’t fit nicely with Beeminder’s notion of days (even with arbitrary deadlines), though might fit better if we get to continuous beeminding…
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That was disingenuous. I’d never been at zero. But I am now.
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