So I’m currently awake. This is because at 3am my phone’s buzzing about the goal I’d decided to let derail became too insistent to sleep through.
This is obviously displeasing to me.
It’s mostly a function of the fact that 3am deadlines are a terrible idea for me, especially with zeno polling. But because there’s no global way to change the behaviour and I’m forgetful (and akratic) it basically means I won’t change it on a particular goal until it causes a problem. It sure would be nice if I could globally configure defaults that worked for me instead.
For now I have solved it by turning off all alarms in the Beeminder app.
Well I know it’s working as intended for the settings I have on. The problem is it’s intended behaviour that I never want and have to remember to turn off for each goal, and that if something disturbs my sleep I’m more likely to uninstall it than do what it intended me to do
There’s two directions that I can see this feature taking, both of which are likely useful:
specify user-global default settings that apply to any goal created thereafter
make it easy to edit setting X across all goals on a single page, for any setting X
The first sounds more straightforward and would remove some of the need for the second.
I’ve described these somewhere. Oh yes, in an email to @dreev:
Proposal: let’s create a default-goal-settings page. For folks with non-traditional habitual sleep patterns, they probably want to specify their own “3am”. I’d want to set my habitual reminder settings, no-mercy recommit, my own boilerplate fine print, etc. And start using those defaults when new goals are created, obviously.
In the fullness of time, I’d also like to be able to edit each setting orthogonally (I think that’s right) so that I can view a particular field, say “3am”, across all of my goals and set it appropriately all in one place. We’ve got a version of this going for notifications, but it’s increasingly messy given the number of options. Admittedly, this idea is easier for simple fields than for interdependent ones. It’d also help when we get support requests to do X across N goals, not least because we could point the user at the feature.
With my visual UI hat on, a little perpendicular button ⟂ next to the relevant fields seems like it’d be unobtrusive and discoverable.
Philip has described a nice general way to handle this sort of thing but I think even our revamped reminder settings page is going to go a long way towards fixing this, just by having a single page where you can quickly adjust both zeno start times and goal deadlines for everything all at once.
Yes I would very much like this. The day after I make a new goal I get the reminder email at 9:30 AM to go in and adjust all the reminder settings to match my other goals. The unified reminders page is nice (beeminder) but they’re all actually identical except for the new goals.
