Happy New Year! This article about New Year’s Resolutions feels very relevant to Beeminder:
But at the very least, it would be unwise for Alice to let her contract-like resolution make her feel like a dirty slacker looking for excuses to cut corners. Her self-image as an ambitious or committed person should be based on, if anything, the difficulty of her personal goals, not their elegance. It’s not her fault that her specific choice of difficulty is not easy to put into short sentences and round numbers!
Beeminder handles the “not round numbers” problem beautifully by default. However, I still sometimes struggle with the “short sentences” part. When I encounter edge cases, I have to decide: Is it weaseling to give myself credit for a “best attempt”? Should I derail and email support? Or should I accept that I should have planned better and just take the derailment?
It’s easier to avoid weaseling if you clearly define how to handle edge cases in advance. So I favor slightly sacrificing graph purity for more comprehensive rules that cover common scenarios. For example: “15 minute of piano daily, except if I’m traveling with no access to a piano and forgot to schedule a break, I can substitute 15 minutes of listening to recordings of a piece I’m practicing.”
Some relevant discussions (suggest more below!):
- @dreev succinctly summarizes this view and its opposite:
[edit: fixed link and title]