The question is essentially the title. I’m expecting a baby in August 
– I’d like to keep benefitting from Beeminder up to my due date, but I’m not sure what to do if the baby comes early.
What would you do in that situation: aim to accumulate and maintain a week of buffer, then schedule breaks and accept the derails if they happen? Ask Beeminder support to schedule breaks? I’m hesitant about the latter because I have twenty-three goals.
Congrats!
I would ask Beeminder support and not think twice about it, even when I had 70 goals. (I probably wouldn’t have had 70 about to derail, but still)
My daughter arrived a week early, and I did in fact just email support. I found the email, it has the subject line “need goals set to 0 because of baby!” and apparently I sent it while in labor, lol. Unless you’re having a LOT of babies, this seems like a pretty reasonable support request.
As far as the number of goals goes, as long as you’re asking for the same break on all of them, it doesn’t matter whether it’s two or twenty. It’s a few manual clicks, but we do have access to using your mass breaks page to add all the breaks at once.
(Fifty goals starts to get a bit much, I’ll admit – that’s still a lot of clicks.)
Personally, my choice would be to keep at least a week’s buffer in advance and quickly add extra time myself, because that’s already my mode of working. Maybe even add a pre-emptive break for August, figuring that one way or another Beeminder isn’t going to be my focus at that point. In general, since Beeminder is meant to include an element of planning ahead when I want to ease up on my commitment, I (personally) find that planning for things that will obviously throw off my goals and have at least a rough time-frame is important.
But if that doesn’t work for you or you try and it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, then contacting the support team is a reasonable way to handle things!