So, if I understand correctly, as a Plan Bee customer I can create fully pledgeless goals - meaning that if I derail, I get to pay nothing, and the next payment level is also 0$. This basically means that derailing, the yellow brick road, and akrasia horizon are useless. Which is kind of the point of a fully pledgeless goal.
The only reason I’d use it (and actually do want to use it for some personal measurements which are only for the information value, not some commitment value) is for data entry and supernice graphs beeminder creates. So, would it be possible to get the derailment stuff, yellow brick roads and etc. out of the graph when you have a fully pledgeless goal? Somehow tied to the maximum pledge setting or something, so that when you actually want to make it a commitment rather than just informal, you could just change the maximum pledge and BOOM, all the commitment stuff would be showing and configurable again.
So, what do you think? Btw, does anyone know of any other charting web service, that you could just input data and see nice graphs of it? For this exact purpose - for informal data sets the commitment stuff really annoys me.
The easiest fix for this is to set a flat or very modest yellow-brick-road, and turn off reminders. You’ll get a yellow stripe at the bottom of your graph, but no commitment. It won’t be invisible, of course, but fairly unobtrusive.
After all, it’s the trend of the data that’s of interest, not the road itself. You can later retrofit the road to the data if you want using the API, or the forthcoming mythical road editor.
That’s what I do for my informational and intermediate goals; and I put them on the back-burner.
philip, I think the whole idea of fully pledgeless goals is an antithetical heresy, and we have those already. And in a fully pledgeless goal, all the commitment contract stuff is both useless and in the way. Thus, my suggestion.
Although I could use some other method for graphing these, it would be nice to have all of the updateable graphs in one place, and as you said, autodata integrations!
Although I’d probably use them for something that I simply have no automatic way of setting up. My idea was that I’d subjectively measure the severeness of my asthma every morning and every night, and set a graph for monitoring that. Now, I have no way of controlling when my asthma worsens or gets a bit better, but by measuring and keeping the data at the same place I could probably see some correlations in stuff that I actually can do something about. Or that’s the hope anyway. Maybe I’ll notice that after every run the next day my asthma feels a bit better, and after everytime I’ve gained weight a bit my asthma worsens? I don’t know, and that’s what I’d use it for.
At a quick glance there some other web services hold the data and draw the graphs, I’ll check them out…
Wrong assumption. I use some goals like these (I’m also on Plan Bee), and the commitment stuff is not useless for me. It’s only that the penalty is less severe: instead of paying money, I have “only” to watch in horror a discontinuity in my YBR. (Actually, if I had a choice, I’d sometimes prefer to pay instead of watching the road break.)
As a rule, I set the pledge and the limit to $0 on goals where it is quite possible to derail due to external factors out of my control.
Also, many (about 2/3) of my goals have a pledge of $0 and they are not the “no-mercy recommit” goals, so - according to your assumption - they should also be useless. Still, Beeminder works perfectly for me.
@mbork Hmm. You do have a point. I think I need to rephrase: In a fully pledgeless goal, all the commitment contract stuff CAN be both useless and in the way.
How about just a switch to toggle all that stuff off per goal?