# Feature Request: Sawtooth yellow brick road for Gmail Zero

**URL:** <https://forum.beeminder.com/t/feature-request-sawtooth-yellow-brick-road-for-gmail-zero/1771>\
**Category:** Bugabee\
**Created:** [January 1, 2016, 11:50pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/feature-request-sawtooth-yellow-brick-road-for-gmail-zero/1771 "2016-01-01T23:50:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![sveinn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/51bf81/32.png) [@sveinn](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/sveinn)\
**Post date:** [January 1, 2016, 11:50pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/feature-request-sawtooth-yellow-brick-road-for-gmail-zero/1771/1 "2016-01-01T23:50:58Z")

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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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawtooth_wave).

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**Author:** ![philip](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/philip/32/1505_2.png) [@philip](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/philip)\
**Post date:** [January 2, 2016, 6:51am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/feature-request-sawtooth-yellow-brick-road-for-gmail-zero/1771/2 "2016-01-02T06:51:42Z")

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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](https://github.com/pjjh/bmndr/blob/master/dance.pl) 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](http://forum.beeminder.com/t/ifttt-macros/804) 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](https://www.beeminder.com/pjh/stringle). 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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**Author:** ![philip](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/philip/32/1505_2.png) [@philip](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/philip)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2016, 11:55am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/feature-request-sawtooth-yellow-brick-road-for-gmail-zero/1771/3 "2016-01-31T11:55:32Z")

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> [@philip](#):
>
> I’m hardly ever at zero

That was disingenuous. I’d never been at zero. But I am now.