I signed up largely to make a do less goal, but cannot seem to find them (there is just no ‘do less’ option on the goal set up page). I thought, maybe I have to have a regular goal first, so I set one up, but the option still doesn’t show. Can anyone advise as to whether I’m missing something?
Edit: apparently there is no way to delete this post; I just thought to check whether “do less” is a premium feature and indeed it is! So ignore this, thanks!
Hello!
Do less goals are trickier to manage than you might expect. A lot of folks have success by reframing the same goal in positive terms.
e.g. ‘drink less coffee’ might become ‘have more coffee-free days’, or ‘have more days on which I stay below my planned consumption threshold’ In @bee’s case it might have been ‘increase the percentage of decaf beans in the grinder mix’
The only reason I came to beeminder was to set up a do less goal incorporating an automated system in which emails beeminder if i don’t wake up at a certain time. IFTTT would scan my twitter for a certain hashtag that would auto post if i didn’t wake up and move it to the next day. Now, a metric of zero is not an option and there is no “do less” option. I don’t want to spam my twitter everyday in order for this to work. Can you explain to me why the only answers that I’ve found about this topic involve stating that your users are not intelligent enough to use a do less goal?
tldr; you can have do less goals, of course you can. They’re just harder to manage than any of us expect them to be. That’s why they’re included with a premium plan rather than in the core.
No slur on intelligence intended. As far as I can tell, our users are some of the cleverest (and best looking) people. There genuinely are some ridiculously smart people on here. Do less goals are just harder to manage, even for people who’ve been beeminding for a while.
That in turn increases frustration and support burden, which is one reason that they’re included in the infinibee subscription. So they exist, and work more or less as you might hope, but we try to protect newbees from the potential weirdness.
One of the problems is that if you stop reporting data for a do more goal, it’ll eventually collide with the road and encourage you to update it. There’s no such protection for do less goals, though we’ve tried a handful of mechanisms over the years.
Also, the concept of being ‘in the red’ on an emergency day is much harder with a do less goal, particularly given the variety of things that people beemind. Some goals are monotonic, others can claw their way back on the road, and for some even the concepts of road lanes isn’t helpful for determining safety buffer.
And so many other quirks, some in the concept, some in the implementation, some in the mismatch between vision and reality.
PS: no need to have IFTTT scan your Twitter feed, Beeminder can do that directly, if it’s a +1 you need. IFTTT could turn it into a -1 of course, which might work with a flat road and a do more goal.
I have do-less goals to track some finances, spending less money in my pocket and limiting budget on clothes. They work fine and are easy to understand, each day Beeminder add budget on my road and I have to stay under the road. When I get money from ATM or buy clothes I add them to my road. I know at each moment how much I can spend.
I did a lot of savings thanks to Beeminder !!!
So I think you must give to everybody the option to create a do-less budget goal.