I have a work deadline every week at midnight Friday evening.
I should Ideally complete this before I log off at 5pm, but as long as I submit before midnight that’s all that matters.
I’m struggling to come up with a good way to track this in Beeminder. I’m thinking minutes/hrs before/ after Friday @midnight deadline?
I know you’re supposed to put 1/7 for 1x week goals, but then I get confused about how this would work if using minutes. I couldn’t really see the progress I want to track, and I feel like I’d have to do some weird delay buffer to not derail throughout the week and then that wouldn’t force the deadline I want?
I’d like to keep track of progress and hopefully see the submission time get earlier and earlier, track any misses which would be derailments. Was thinking about an IFTTT button that would submit the data point.
Hmm, is there any reason why just adding +1 for “I did it” sometime before midnight on Friday wouldn’t work? Maybe I’m not understanding the setup you want?
If you just want to make sure you finish it on time, then indeed just +1 with a rate of 1/week will do it.
If what you actually want is to encourage yourself to do it early, then it’s a bit trickier, just like, psychologically. I’ve indeed made goals that are like “go to bed on average X minutes before midnight”, but you’re kinda right that this might work pretty awkwardly for a 1/week task, unless you have a lot of buffer. But then if you have a lot of buffer, you won’t necessarily realize how early you need to finish this friday in order for your buffer to carry to next friday.
Does anything actually stop you from doing the task on Thursday if you didn’t leave yourself enough buffer? If not, you may be willing to accept this tradeoff.
Nothing also stops you from making the goal +1 for finishing by 5pm, and just say too bad, you derail if you finish it at 6 pm.
Another option would be to think of other tasks you want to finish “early” on other days of the week, and combine them all into the same goal. This would make managing the buffer a bit easier, but you obviously may not want to do it / may not even have other suitable tasks.