I have a goal of writing 750 words everyday. I’ve used a binary system of 1 or 0 to represent yes or no.
I’d like to have more data so I want to log my words written each day opposed to 1 or 0. So I created a goal with a daily rate of 750. I then set my max safe days to 0.
What I anticipated was for the goal to auto ratchet back to a minimum of 750 words after my derail time regardless of how much I wrote the day before. So if I write 3000 words today, I would still have to write 750 tomorrow.
However setting max safe days to 0 doesn’t seem to affect the derail time.
I would appreciate this feature too. There are many goals I want to persue where I just “show up” e.g. do at least 1 minute of Anki reviews everyday. Now if I’ve been lazy a few days and built quite the backlog, I can review for 20 minutes in one day and that gives me 20 days of buffer, which is what I don’t want! I want to study everyday. Conceivably, I can retroratchet to eep day everyday, but this gets kind of tedious for certain type of goals, especially if you have many of these “show up” goals.
The autoratchet feature is already there, but it can only autoratchet to a minimum of 2 days. I think this is a relic from when you were only able to retroratchet to a minimum 2 days, and the feature hasn’t been updated since? I might be wrong. But it would be nice if we could autoratchet it to 1 safety day (orange) or 0 (eep! day) if we wanted to.
Being able to autoratchet to emergency days solves the problem of habitualization (http://blog.beeminder.com/habits/) i.e. setting your YBR so low that the goal becomes harder because it’s not a habit anymore. Now that everyday’s an eep day, you have to make it a habit!
Autoratchet was broken for a while, but I fixed it up a few weeks ago and it should work like manual ratchets now, which means that Do More goals ought to work with 0 safe days (slightly more detailed explanation here).
There is one potential problem I anticipate, which is this might cause double derails, since it’s problematic ratcheting to an eep day immediately after derail. So keep an eye out for this, and drop us a line in support if you if you do set yourself up to an every-day’s-an-eep-day situation!
Is this related to the issue I saw earlier when I used retroratchet (not auto-ratchet) to set 0 safe days and the goal derailed instead of ending up as an eep day? (The support ticket went to Jill on Feb 16).
Oh hey, that reply never made it to me! I’ve just searched Gmail for various snippets of that reply and it’s definitely not there, so maybe something got black-holed along the way?
In any case, yes that definitely clears things up. In the meantime it might be nice if the retroratchet tool would refuse to function in this corner case, rather than going ahead and derailing.
However, I was asking for retro to 0 because I forgot no-mercy gives you 2 days. I’m actually OK with that.
