Quite a few times I stumble upon someone’s goal and think “man that is a nice goal, I like that, I should copy this!” but then don’t because I am highly acratic.
I’d like to be able to copy existing users’ goals and make them my own. Especially given the recent rise of journals and the within there linked goals I think this would be a lovely addition that fits well into the “we like you to have your goals public” philosophy.
Of course this needs some thought regarding what details to share exactly because privacy and data protection but I am gonna leave that for someone else to figure out. Spontaneous ideas include sending them a mail “$user likes your goal and would like to copy it. That ok?” Which would probably be the easiest. Or some checkbox in the settings “allow this goal to be copied. Note: this may expose more information about the goal than what can be viewed publicly already” or something in that ballpark. Or make them all copyable / shareable by default and make it opt-out. Or make public share links that people would need to click to copy the goal.
I see I should have worded this differently. My primary motivation is not impulsive goal creation but the elimination of the somewhat tedious goal creation process (especially with custom goals).
Regarding the impulsive goal creation: That sounds so negative and I think conveys a different meaning than what I had in mind. In fact a lot of times even for days after I read about some goal in someone’s journal I sometimes ponder about copying their goal. But then don’t do it because well we all know why.
Making copying a one-click process would (for me) lower the perceived effort hopefully so much that I would actually do it.
Besides you got an entire week afterwards to cancel it again if you don’t like it. So what’s the harm?
Right now it’s too hard to create goals. I wish you could copy one of your own goals and change the name. I want goal creation to be more impulsive instead of having to click 100 times and change 100 settings.
I think the poll here is biased away from “gimme” because it doesn’t include the people who would have gotten started with beeminder if such a simple button existed but instead left forever.