In the worst case, don’t miss it with a cut-off time by 12:00 pm each day.
I don’t want to be reminded to do this every day.
I want to use Beeminder to commit myself into this habit that If I miss meditation for a day, I pay the fine, however, my next day goal of meditation remains intact and I don’t want to pay fine again.
Please help me in formulating this goal.
Question 1: What Goal Type should I choose for this “Do Regularly Task”?
I don’t know if any of commit to “at-least” or “limit yourself to” is suitable here. I don’t want to do more or do less.
After selecting the goal type, what should I do next?
Make a Do More goal, with a rate of 1 session per day.
Once you’re in the goal, go to Commitment, set the Max Safe Days to 0.
This makes it so that every night, it takes any built up safety buffer and
throws it all away so you have to meditate the next day.
Then under Commitment set Derail Behavior to No Mercy. This means you get
no time off if you miss meditation for a day.
Next, go to Settings, and under Deadline and Reminders, set the reminder
behavior. I would highly recommend having it send a reminder at 11:30 or
something, but you can completely block them out here too. It won’t remind
you if you already have your data in for the day either.
The default deadline is midnight so that already matches what you want.
Then, when you meditate, come to the website or app and enter “1” as a
datapoint.
In this situation, max safe days wouldn’t have much of an effect anyway. It would slightly shorten the no mercy period so that, after a derailment, you only get one day off instead of two days.
You can simulate that yourself by using the manual safety buffer feature on the morning of a derailment.
Normally, even if your intention is to do something daily, we recommend setting a slightly more lenient slope, like six times per week, so that you’ve got a little bit of slack. You have to be nice to yourself when establishing new habits…
Normally, even if your intention is to do something daily, we recommend setting a slightly more lenient slope, like six times per week, so that you’ve got a little bit of slack.
I agree with you on this. For this goal, which I think, it is easy for me, only 10-minutes of a morning time, I want to be in a mode of “NoZeroDays” to build my habit.
For harder tasks, I might be lenient with myself. Let’s see how this goes.
Also, one thing I realized. Staying above the yellow-brick road does not apply for this kind of a goal. I will always be below the yellow brick-road.
Like @senthil, I would also really like a TRUE “no mercy” option; I have quite a few goals where having any buffer makes no sense (taking daily pills, for example) and having that extra “safe day” when I derail is somewhere between awkward and fail-inducing (I’m a “do my goals when they’re red” person, so having my pill goal be yellow means I ignore it, even when I could trivially do it)
There are underlying technical reasons, iirc, which is also why you can’t manually ratchet to 0 safe days on the day after a derailment.
I also do ridiculously badly in the period immediately following a derailment, which is why I’ve set my default to be ‘no mercy’ for new goals. It’s not always the right thing, but often better than getting a whole week off, for my personal psychology.