Is Total Buffer a better metric than Urgency Load?

[skorytnicki]

Use BUI

[enbee]

@linux535

Though one aspect of urgency load I don’t like is that auto ratchet goals tend to make it go a lot higher. I feel like if you are at your max buffer than it should add zero. As you are not doing anything bad such as edge skating you simply have chosen to cap the buffer.

very late to reply here again, but seconding this very much!

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@dreev

Now I’m wondering if we could show both Urgency Load and Total Buffer in the UI. And Total Buffer, when showing the denominator in parentheses, could account for autoratchets. Namely, your maximum possible Total Buffer is the sum of your autoratchet setting on each goal, or 7 if you don’t have an autoratchet.

i would love this! but why not make urgency load also account for autoratchets? :)

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@philip

@dreev

@enbee

anyway, where can i find my urgency load again?

It’s in the Statistics tab, under the Due By table:

I had no idea it was there. Always wondered what my urgency load was.

Not least because that’s a terrible place for it to live — all the other statistics on that tab are about the individual goal.

very late thank you to @dreev for the answer and to what @philip said!

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to add some original thoughts that came to my head after reading through this thread again:

for me, what any metric like this (including the current urgency load) is missing, is a reference point. yes, with urgency load we can say we always strive to get 0 (disregarding autoratcheted goals for a moment), but an urgency load of e.g. 7 could mean a lot of very different things:

• you have 1 goal and it’s a beemergency today (immediate action required!)
• you have 7 goals with 6 days of buffer each (definitely no immediate action required)
• anything in between those two

so i guess i would prefer it to say 7/7 or 7/49, or something like that. and this is especially where taking autoratchets into account would be lovely!

how do people who regularly use urgency load as a useful metric for themselves deal with this? i guess after a while you get a feeling for what range of urgency load is doable for you?

personally, i love the goal dashboard view where it shows me the coloured frames. easily at one glance i see which goals are red, which are orange, which are blue, which are green; and i know of course which of the red and orange ones are purposefully that colour and thus maybe couldn’t be “promoted” to the next higher colour. then i can work my way through them from most to least urgent, until i don’t feel like it anymore. works like a charm so far! :)
(of course this is not really beemind-able, but also i’ve never felt a strong urge to meta-beemind anything yet; probably don’t have enough goals for that yet :p)

[linux535]

@enbee

i would love this! but why not make urgency load also account for autoratchets? :)

That’s actually a good idea. Maybe it could make what the autorachet is set too count as 7. Though I could see some saying it makes urgency load less useful.

[enbee]

@linux535

Though I could see some saying it makes urgency load less useful.

easy workaround: having the option to choose and switch between the two however one prefers. :) (“easy” from the user-perspective; probably extra difficult to program.)

[dreev]

Really good questions and ideas here. I’ve been trying an experimental feature to keep both Urgency Load and Total Buffer on my dashboard:

But alas, without actually beeminding it, I’ve just become banner-blind to it!

So I still don’t know which, if either, I’d expect to be more useful.

I guess this means I need to try beeminding it! Ok, here I go:

As for whether Urgency Load and/or Total Buffer should account for autoratchets – also not obvious! (Reminder to ourselves that making it a setting because we don’t know which choice is better is a classic red flag.)

[enbee]

@dreev

As for whether Urgency Load and/or Total Buffer should account for autoratchets – also not obvious! (Reminder to ourselves that making it a setting because we don’t know which choice is better is a classic red flag .)

fascinating blog post! i guess i stand corrected about making it a setting.

so here’s my impassioned argument for absolutely making urgency load and total buffer (if that becomes a thing) account for autoratchets:

• i definitely wouldn’t use them if they don’t account for autoratchets!
• it is much more motivating if everyone is theoretically able to achieve the “best” number.
• having the “best” number be the same for everyone makes it more useful as a tool for comparing yourself with other people. obviously the amount of goals plays a huge part in this, having 60% total buffer with two goals is much less “impressive” than having 60% total buffer with 200 goals—they’re still easier to compare, though, if we know they both could reach “100%”. otherwise you’d always have to say “i know 60% total buffer doesn’t sound like a lot, but i’m actually unable to get past 80% because of my autoratchets, so the number’s really much higher, actually”. (same would be true for urgency load, my brain’s just better at dealing with % right now.)
• if urgency load/total buffer don’t account for autoratchets, and someone in the forum speaks proudly of their 98% buffer / 5 urgency load / whatever, i would feel annoyed and left out, because my own goal choices (which i like and have chosen in the spirit of beeminder, i’d like to think!) would prevent me from attaining that same achievement. (satisfying numbers make brain go brr)
• speaking of achievements, there might be another “free goal” idea here: +1 free goal the first time you reach 0 urgency load / 100% buffer (having at least 2 active goals and having beeminded for at least a week, or something like that)—if this were a way to get +1 free goal, you’d have to account for autoratchets, imo, because not doing so would be incredibly unfair to everyone who would otherwise qualify. (i realise that autoratcheting is currently still a premium feature, but iirc it’s on the near-ish roadmap to be rolled out for everyone; and even if it weren’t, people might like an additional free goal after their subscriptions run out, for example.)

i hope my rambling makes sense and isn’t too incoherent :)

[skorytnicki]

Since my original post, I got accustomed to tracking total buffer as percentage. This is really good, because it measures my efforts against my time.

With my do more goals, I can’t create limitless amount of them. I have to track if I can fit them into my routine.

[skorytnicki]

You see urgency load and total buffer as %