If i wanted to have to do A Thing say 3 times a week, I am happy to set up a 3/7 Weekly goal. However, how do I stop myself from getting ahead of myself?
For example, lets say I did The Thing 5 times in one week. I /still/ want to be made to do it 3 times the following week, and not just once since I did two extra in the first week.
I /think/ this relates to ratcheting to discard that extra buffer, and if I am right is that a manual thing or can I somehow set the goal up to manage that.
I did once try to use an AutoRatchet partner site I found, but I dont think a Do More goal is compatable with that system. Maybe I am over-complicating this.
For something you want to do three times per week, you created a do-more goal with a daily rate of 3/7. As you point out, you could very easily perform all three of those on the same day and you could also perform 5 of them throughout any 7 day period.
You could of course perform 6 of them one week and Beeminder would not even bother to let you know about your goal of “3 per week” the following week because you had already done enough to cover those three, having performed all 6 that first week.
So the question is how to have Beeminder get on you about getting back to your goal and performing those 3 things that second week.
In the fine details I think it becomes a bit mucky for various reasons:
You are thinking in terms of weeks, perhaps Gregorian calendar weeks, and Beeminder is coded in something closer to days.
Beeminder does not really have the concept of calendar week and would not natively support “three per calendar week”.
3/7 works just fine like that as a fraction. As a decimal it is a repeating decimal and will be subject to rounding and thus rounding errors. Having entered 3/7, this is converted in Beeminder to some decimal number with a finite precision, 0.428571428571428571428571428571428571...? In the UI I see 0.42857142857142855 used. This means the rate for your do-more goal will be this number of amounts each day. You can use the Goal/Setting/Data to specify your data is in numbers and nummy display precision is 1. This way Beeminder will nudge you to provide at least 1 when some smaller amount would have been due.
Yes, ratcheting would be a way to go about wiping away some built up buffer. How often should such ratcheting be performed? Weekly? From Sunday to Monday, ratcheting should be performed to knock away any more than now much buffer? Any at all? That could make you also have to perform the first amount already the next day although you might otherwise be OK with performing the task Tuesday, Wednesday, and again on Saturday. Maybe the ratchet then takes all but one day away, but even that dictates which day of the week will need the first of the three do-more datapoints.
[We are all] open to suggestions for how to tweak Beeminder to handle such a situation: require at least 3 of a thing per week, each week.
So far, for goals of mine like this, I usually just manually ratchet down to fewer safe days. I previously had some similar to that, but monthly.
How long have you had your Beeminder goal? Maybe this buffer build-up has not become an issue. Or maybe becoming more acquainted with Beeminder and maintaining (feeding) your goal to have a better understanding of what the day-to-day feels like.
I haven’t yet set the goal up, was looking for some feedback to stop me setting it up wrong initially.
It sounds like a bit of manual ratcheting will be needed, perhaps to leave myself with a weeks buffer, meaning that I’ll derail if I don’t do /anything/ that week and doing The Thing at least once pushes that further.
Maybe I’m kidding myself that I’ll actually get ahead of myself ( after all, if this was sometrhing i was willingly doing without some kind of external pressure i wouldnt need to set it up in Beeminder…)
Many of us have a goal with a name like calendial with a slope of 1/week to check our calendars and decide if any slopes need adjusting in the coming weeks. With such a goal, it is easy to build in a requirement to ratchet every week. For most of my goals, when I dial I ratchet down to a week of buffer.
That being said… Since ratcheting creates work for “future you”, not “present you”, I am not sure there would be much temptation to cheat. I suspect it would work totally fine to just make a calendar reminder to ratchet every week or something if you regularly use a calendar, for example.