I’ve converted some of my fitness and coursera goals to weekly to allow for some leeway during the week. Turns out that fitness goals are in blue. But the coursera goals always on the edge as I end up doing just the bare minimum day equivalent on any given day. And risk falling off every day. e.g. I converted my daily 21mins goal to weekly bringing the daily goal to 15mins. Now instead of doing 21mins 5 days a week, I ended up doing 15mins daily.
Yes I could do more everyday and earn that leeway but I wonder if there’s a more beemindful way of doing it.
This might be the kind of thing we can better help with in support but since we have the thread now, would you mind adding a screenshot of your graph so we can visualize what’s happening better?
My guess is that the simplest answer will be to use the take-a-break feature to schedule a week of flat spot on the bright red line. Then once you hit that flat spot, and as long as you do the weekly amount each week, you’ll retain total flexibility on what days of the week you need to get the work (workouts) done.
Hello, thanks for the reply. Yes, taking a break is something I could use, as I didn’t get my feet wet.
The graph you requested is here. Note that I am always on the red line, primarily because I do the minimum daily equivalent of the weekly goal. Instead of doing more on some days to get some time off.
Ah, yeah, the key is that in a sense there’s just no such thing as a weekly goal. If you say you want to commit to, say, 2 workouts per week, well, that’s mathematically 2/7 = 0.285714 workouts per day and that’s what Beeminder holds you to. The only way to get flexibility on what days of the week those 2 workouts happen on is to have some safety buffer, i.e., not be skating the bright red line. And the easiest way to do that is to create the goal with an initial flat spot. Or schedule the flat spot now and hang on for another week till you reach it (and then, even harder, not squander it).
This pair of help docs spells that out better and has a nice visual illustration of what’s going on:
I should add that if you’re new to Beeminder and you backed yourself into a corner due to not understanding that, we’re generally happy to help get you sorted in support.
