pushups 3am loophole

[dreev]

I just exploited an interesting loophole with my pushups goal:
beeminder.com/d/push

It’s a bit ironic because I purposely stopped 2 pushups below my road
yesterday in anticipation of a demo at a Quantified Self meetup of how
delightfully wonderful beeminding pushups is if you have an android
device. [1] I showed everyone how I was in the red and due to derail
in about 4 hours, at midnight. But then I did 2 pushups in front of
everyone and refreshed the page, and BAM, there I was on the road
again. The crowd went wild.

Anyway, that meant another emergency day today, which the bot
faithfully reminded me of. Actually I got reminded by the email bot
AND the sms bot AND the android app. But I kept being like, “I’ll do
the pushups later when the office empties out”. Then of course I
forgot till just now, which is after midnight.

But it’s not after 3am so my graph hadn’t actually frozen and
scheduled the $90 charge yet. Here’s where the loophole comes in.
Normally it’s up to you to enter the day so if I wanted to consider it
still the 16th I’d just enter 16 and my number and Beeminder would be
fine with that if the graph wasn’t frozen. But TallyBee is entering my
data for me, and it considers it the 17th if it’s after midnight.
Nonetheless, Beeminder only counts you as derailed if it sees you get
to the end of an emergency day still off the road. Which, for
technical reasons, it treats as “still off the road when the graph
refreshes on the new day after the emergency day”. So, violating the
must fundamental tenet of Beeminder, I did enough pushups to catch me
back up! I was off the road for the 16th but when it calculated the
new graph after midnight, officially for the 17th, I was on the road.
So the condition for calling me derailed was never triggered.

So I guess I’ll let it stand for now, but obviously no one should be
counting on that friendly bug persisting…
(And just to remove any temptation for myself: I hereby affirm that we
cannot weasel out of paying up on any of our dogfood contracts –
blog.beeminder.com/blogdog – by exploiting this loophole!)

It now occurs to me that I’ve exploited this before with my weight,
which is similarly auto-reported by our Withings scale. I had an
emergency weight day, meaning I was above the road in the morning. So
I didn’t eat anything all day so I could weigh in again and be back on
the road at night. But it was our Tuesday hack night and we were out
till almost midnight. I raced home, almost but not quite by midnight.
I got on the scale anyway and, what with not eating and all the
sweating from racing home, was easily back on my road or even below
it. And since it wasn’t 3am and the graph hadn’t frozen, it let me get
away with catching back up – being off the road for the entirety of
the emergency day but back on the road on what was technically the day
after.

[1] Grab this version of Bethany’s TallyBee app – http://dreev.es/tb
– and specify your pushup graph URL (which you should set up as an
Odometer goal because TallyBee keeps a running total of pushups, like
an odometer) and then just DO PUSHUPS. Touch your nose to the phone as
you do them and that’s the entirety of the interface. Nothing to enter
or sync or anything. Do pushups, graph updates. It’s so great!

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

[Paul_Fenwick]

I think we have different ideas as to when a day “ends”. For me, a
day “ends” when I go to sleep, and around 3am isn’t that unusual for
me. It certainly does not end at midnight.

I consider the ability to get back on the road by 3am an accidental feature.

Paul

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:17 AM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

I just exploited an interesting loophole with my pushups goal:
push – d – beeminder

It’s a bit ironic because I purposely stopped 2 pushups below my road
yesterday in anticipation of a demo at a Quantified Self meetup of how
delightfully wonderful beeminding pushups is if you have an android
device. [1] I showed everyone how I was in the red and due to derail
in about 4 hours, at midnight. But then I did 2 pushups in front of
everyone and refreshed the page, and BAM, there I was on the road
again. The crowd went wild.

Anyway, that meant another emergency day today, which the bot
faithfully reminded me of. Actually I got reminded by the email bot
AND the sms bot AND the android app. But I kept being like, “I’ll do
the pushups later when the office empties out”. Then of course I
forgot till just now, which is after midnight.

But it’s not after 3am so my graph hadn’t actually frozen and
scheduled the $90 charge yet. Here’s where the loophole comes in.
Normally it’s up to you to enter the day so if I wanted to consider it
still the 16th I’d just enter 16 and my number and Beeminder would be
fine with that if the graph wasn’t frozen. But TallyBee is entering my
data for me, and it considers it the 17th if it’s after midnight.
Nonetheless, Beeminder only counts you as derailed if it sees you get
to the end of an emergency day still off the road. Which, for
technical reasons, it treats as “still off the road when the graph
refreshes on the new day after the emergency day”. So, violating the
must fundamental tenet of Beeminder, I did enough pushups to catch me
back up! I was off the road for the 16th but when it calculated the
new graph after midnight, officially for the 17th, I was on the road.
So the condition for calling me derailed was never triggered.

So I guess I’ll let it stand for now, but obviously no one should be
counting on that friendly bug persisting…
(And just to remove any temptation for myself: I hereby affirm that we
cannot weasel out of paying up on any of our dogfood contracts –
Dog Food Renewed | Beeminder Blog – by exploiting this loophole!)

It now occurs to me that I’ve exploited this before with my weight,
which is similarly auto-reported by our Withings scale. I had an
emergency weight day, meaning I was above the road in the morning. So
I didn’t eat anything all day so I could weigh in again and be back on
the road at night. But it was our Tuesday hack night and we were out
till almost midnight. I raced home, almost but not quite by midnight.
I got on the scale anyway and, what with not eating and all the
sweating from racing home, was easily back on my road or even below
it. And since it wasn’t 3am and the graph hadn’t frozen, it let me get
away with catching back up – being off the road for the entirety of
the emergency day but back on the road on what was technically the day
after.

[1] Grab this version of Bethany’s TallyBee app – http://dreev.es/tb
– and specify your pushup graph URL (which you should set up as an
Odometer goal because TallyBee keeps a running total of pushups, like
an odometer) and then just DO PUSHUPS. Touch your nose to the phone as
you do them and that’s the entirety of the interface. Nothing to enter
or sync or anything. Do pushups, graph updates. It’s so great!

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

[Valerio_De_Camillis]

I’m with Paul on this one.
It’s more of a feature than a “friendly bug”. You could also let the user
specify the time when a day really ends!

Ciao,
\ Valerio De Camillis

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Paul Fenwick paul.j.fenwick@gmail.comwrote:

I think we have different ideas as to when a day “ends”. For me, a
day “ends” when I go to sleep, and around 3am isn’t that unusual for
me. It certainly does not end at midnight.

I consider the ability to get back on the road by 3am an accidental
feature.

Paul

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:17 AM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

I just exploited an interesting loophole with my pushups goal:
push – d – beeminder

It’s a bit ironic because I purposely stopped 2 pushups below my road
yesterday in anticipation of a demo at a Quantified Self meetup of how
delightfully wonderful beeminding pushups is if you have an android
device. [1] I showed everyone how I was in the red and due to derail
in about 4 hours, at midnight. But then I did 2 pushups in front of
everyone and refreshed the page, and BAM, there I was on the road
again. The crowd went wild.

Anyway, that meant another emergency day today, which the bot
faithfully reminded me of. Actually I got reminded by the email bot
AND the sms bot AND the android app. But I kept being like, “I’ll do
the pushups later when the office empties out”. Then of course I
forgot till just now, which is after midnight.

But it’s not after 3am so my graph hadn’t actually frozen and
scheduled the $90 charge yet. Here’s where the loophole comes in.
Normally it’s up to you to enter the day so if I wanted to consider it
still the 16th I’d just enter 16 and my number and Beeminder would be
fine with that if the graph wasn’t frozen. But TallyBee is entering my
data for me, and it considers it the 17th if it’s after midnight.
Nonetheless, Beeminder only counts you as derailed if it sees you get
to the end of an emergency day still off the road. Which, for
technical reasons, it treats as “still off the road when the graph
refreshes on the new day after the emergency day”. So, violating the
must fundamental tenet of Beeminder, I did enough pushups to catch me
back up! I was off the road for the 16th but when it calculated the
new graph after midnight, officially for the 17th, I was on the road.
So the condition for calling me derailed was never triggered.

So I guess I’ll let it stand for now, but obviously no one should be
counting on that friendly bug persisting…
(And just to remove any temptation for myself: I hereby affirm that we
cannot weasel out of paying up on any of our dogfood contracts –
Dog Food Renewed | Beeminder Blog – by exploiting this loophole!)

It now occurs to me that I’ve exploited this before with my weight,
which is similarly auto-reported by our Withings scale. I had an
emergency weight day, meaning I was above the road in the morning. So
I didn’t eat anything all day so I could weigh in again and be back on
the road at night. But it was our Tuesday hack night and we were out
till almost midnight. I raced home, almost but not quite by midnight.
I got on the scale anyway and, what with not eating and all the
sweating from racing home, was easily back on my road or even below
it. And since it wasn’t 3am and the graph hadn’t frozen, it let me get
away with catching back up – being off the road for the entirety of
the emergency day but back on the road on what was technically the day
after.

[1] Grab this version of Bethany’s TallyBee app – http://dreev.es/tb
– and specify your pushup graph URL (which you should set up as an
Odometer goal because TallyBee keeps a running total of pushups, like
an odometer) and then just DO PUSHUPS. Touch your nose to the phone as
you do them and that’s the entirety of the interface. Nothing to enter
or sync or anything. Do pushups, graph updates. It’s so great!

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

[dreev]

I used to think we really needed to let people customize the official
end of the day but I’m not so sure anymore.
If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business. If you’re a night
owl then you can stay up all night Monday night so the report’s done
by 5pm the next day. Same with Beeminder. If it gives you a deadline
of midnight and that’s like the middle of the day for you and you do
your best work after midnight, well, do your work after midnight. The
previous midnight, the one before the deadline.

The point is, deadlines are perfectly arbitrary. Changing from 3am to
midnight isn’t necessarily 3 fewer hours. Think of it as 21 more.

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your
pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

But I suspect that that would not help you the way you imagine it would…

STATUS QUO:
You’re in the wrong lane and think to yourself “I have pushups due
tomorrow; I better do them before I go to bed…”
“Or I guess I could do them in the morning…”
“Or I guess after lunch would work…”
“Or after dinner there will still be time…”
“Doh! It’s after midnight!” or “Doh! It’s after 3am!” [derail]

WITH A CUSTOM END-OF-DAY AT, SAY, 6AM:
You’re in the wrong lane but you know you have all day and all night
tomorrow so no worries.
You wake up on the emergency day and think “I have to do pushups
before I go to bed tonight. Plenty of time!”
16 hours later it has vanished from your mind. You go to bed. If
you’re lucky you wake up in a panic at 5:50am and do your pushups.
But probably you derail.

Being pathologically akratic just kinda sucks no matter how you slice it!
(I’m excited for our Android and iPhone apps to figure out a way to
nag you the right way that they convey the ever-growing urgency of
your imminent derailment without wolf-crying and making you tune them
out. This turns out to be a hard problem.)

I think most helpful for us akratics is for the deadline to be
obvious, memorable, and very hard. So I like midnight, and I don’t
like it being customizable.

Another clarification about the supposed friendliness of this bug: If
you need one more pushup by the end of the day and you do that pushup
right after midnight and either TallyBee submits it or you enter it
with a caret (^) for “today” then your graph will freeze. It’s the new
day now and you were off the road on the emergency day and are off it
again now. The way to exploit the loophole is to catch up by doing
enough pushups that you’re back on the road for the day after the
emergency day.

So that’s why I think we need to fix this bug. It’s just too
confusing. It leads you to think that you have till 3am but it’s more
subtle than that.

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 4:53 AM, Valerio De Camillis
worthstream@gmail.com wrote:

I’m with Paul on this one.
It’s more of a feature than a “friendly bug”. You could also let the user
specify the time when a day really ends!

Ciao,
\ Valerio De Camillis

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Paul Fenwick paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com
wrote:

I think we have different ideas as to when a day “ends”. For me, a
day “ends” when I go to sleep, and around 3am isn’t that unusual for
me. It certainly does not end at midnight.

I consider the ability to get back on the road by 3am an accidental
feature.

Paul

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:17 AM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

I just exploited an interesting loophole with my pushups goal:
push – d – beeminder

It’s a bit ironic because I purposely stopped 2 pushups below my road
yesterday in anticipation of a demo at a Quantified Self meetup of how
delightfully wonderful beeminding pushups is if you have an android
device. [1] I showed everyone how I was in the red and due to derail
in about 4 hours, at midnight. But then I did 2 pushups in front of
everyone and refreshed the page, and BAM, there I was on the road
again. The crowd went wild.

Anyway, that meant another emergency day today, which the bot
faithfully reminded me of. Actually I got reminded by the email bot
AND the sms bot AND the android app. But I kept being like, “I’ll do
the pushups later when the office empties out”. Then of course I
forgot till just now, which is after midnight.

But it’s not after 3am so my graph hadn’t actually frozen and
scheduled the $90 charge yet. Here’s where the loophole comes in.
Normally it’s up to you to enter the day so if I wanted to consider it
still the 16th I’d just enter 16 and my number and Beeminder would be
fine with that if the graph wasn’t frozen. But TallyBee is entering my
data for me, and it considers it the 17th if it’s after midnight.
Nonetheless, Beeminder only counts you as derailed if it sees you get
to the end of an emergency day still off the road. Which, for
technical reasons, it treats as “still off the road when the graph
refreshes on the new day after the emergency day”. So, violating the
must fundamental tenet of Beeminder, I did enough pushups to catch me
back up! I was off the road for the 16th but when it calculated the
new graph after midnight, officially for the 17th, I was on the road.
So the condition for calling me derailed was never triggered.

So I guess I’ll let it stand for now, but obviously no one should be
counting on that friendly bug persisting…
(And just to remove any temptation for myself: I hereby affirm that we
cannot weasel out of paying up on any of our dogfood contracts –
Dog Food Renewed | Beeminder Blog – by exploiting this loophole!)

It now occurs to me that I’ve exploited this before with my weight,
which is similarly auto-reported by our Withings scale. I had an
emergency weight day, meaning I was above the road in the morning. So
I didn’t eat anything all day so I could weigh in again and be back on
the road at night. But it was our Tuesday hack night and we were out
till almost midnight. I raced home, almost but not quite by midnight.
I got on the scale anyway and, what with not eating and all the
sweating from racing home, was easily back on my road or even below
it. And since it wasn’t 3am and the graph hadn’t frozen, it let me get
away with catching back up – being off the road for the entirety of
the emergency day but back on the road on what was technically the day
after.

[1] Grab this version of Bethany’s TallyBee app – http://dreev.es/tb
– and specify your pushup graph URL (which you should set up as an
Odometer goal because TallyBee keeps a running total of pushups, like
an odometer) and then just DO PUSHUPS. Touch your nose to the phone as
you do them and that’s the entirety of the interface. Nothing to enter
or sync or anything. Do pushups, graph updates. It’s so great!

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

[Paul_Fenwick]

On 08/17/2012 12:03 PM, Daniel Reeves wrote:

If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business.

I do this all the time, but that’s beside the point. However…

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your
pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

But I suspect that that would not help you the way you imagine it would…

I imagine it would help:

• I have a goal to floss my teeth.
• I remember that I should floss my teeth when I brush them.
• I remember to brush my teeth before I go to bed.
• I go to bed when I get sleepy.
• I usually get sleepy after midnight.

We’re taught from a very early age that bedtime is where you place your
check-lists of behaviours:

"Have you brushed your teeth before going to bed?"

"Make sure you do your homework before going to bed."

"Don't forget to plug in your personal electronics to charge before

going to bed."

Sure enough, bedtime, more than any other event, is likely to trigger my
mental check-lists. Almost every person I’ve met has at least tooth-brushing
chained to their “about to sleep” condition. I happen to have “check
Beeminder and TODO lists” in there as well.

If you’re a person who goes to bed at 10pm each night, behind
on a goal, derail at midnight, then you still have two hours to put
things right after you remember it at “bedtime”.

If you’re a person who goes to bed at 2am each morning, then by the time
you’ve hit the check-list, you’ve already failed. The night before when
going through your check-list, you had 22 hours before failure, so you’ll
“do it tomorrow”.

Not having a configurable “end of day” means people with non-mainstream
sleeping hours will have a harder time achieving their goals.

If you’re still not convinced, then change everyone’s deadline from midnight
to noon and see what responses you get.

Paul

[Apneet_Jolly]

I concur - esp because “bedtime” for me is often 3-4 am.
I’ve got my fitbit set to a different time zone to simulate this - esp because I’m often switching time zones.

-----Original Message-----
From: akratics@googlegroups.com [mailto:akratics@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Paul Fenwick
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2012 3:46 AM
To: akratics@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: pushups 3am loophole

On 08/17/2012 12:03 PM, Daniel Reeves wrote:

If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business.

I do this all the time, but that’s beside the point. However…

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your
pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

But I suspect that that would not help you the way you imagine it would…

I imagine it would help:

• I have a goal to floss my teeth.
• I remember that I should floss my teeth when I brush them.
• I remember to brush my teeth before I go to bed.
• I go to bed when I get sleepy.
• I usually get sleepy after midnight.

We’re taught from a very early age that bedtime is where you place your check-lists of behaviours:

"Have you brushed your teeth before going to bed?"

"Make sure you do your homework before going to bed."

"Don't forget to plug in your personal electronics to charge before going to bed."

Sure enough, bedtime, more than any other event, is likely to trigger my mental check-lists. Almost every person I’ve met has at least tooth-brushing chained to their “about to sleep” condition. I happen to have “check Beeminder and TODO lists” in there as well.

If you’re a person who goes to bed at 10pm each night, behind on a goal, derail at midnight, then you still have two hours to put things right after you remember it at “bedtime”.

If you’re a person who goes to bed at 2am each morning, then by the time you’ve hit the check-list, you’ve already failed. The night before when going through your check-list, you had 22 hours before failure, so you’ll “do it tomorrow”.

Not having a configurable “end of day” means people with non-mainstream sleeping hours will have a harder time achieving their goals.

If you’re still not convinced, then change everyone’s deadline from midnight to noon and see what responses you get.

Paul

[Valerio_De_Camillis]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 7:47 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I concur - esp because “bedtime” for me is often 3-4 am.
I’ve got my fitbit set to a different time zone to simulate this - esp
because I’m often switching time zones.

Changing timezone looks like a solution. A non user-friendly one, but it’s
something i’ll try when i get back to beeminding.

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:03 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.comwrote:

I used to think we really needed to let people customize the official
end of the day but I’m not so sure anymore.
If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business. If you’re a night
owl then you can stay up all night Monday night so the report’s done
by 5pm the next day. Same with Beeminder. If it gives you a deadline
of midnight and that’s like the middle of the day for you and you do
your best work after midnight, well, do your work after midnight. The
previous midnight, the one before the deadline.

The point is, deadlines are perfectly arbitrary. Changing from 3am to
midnight isn’t necessarily 3 fewer hours. Think of it as 21 more.

Not really, see what you did say about skirting the edge of the yellow
brick road vs. staying on the right side of the middle of the road: Being
akratic does not let you think rationally a day in advance.

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your

pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

WITH A CUSTOM END-OF-DAY AT, SAY, 6AM:
You’re in the wrong lane but you know you have all day and all night
tomorrow so no worries.
You wake up on the emergency day and think “I have to do pushups
before I go to bed tonight. Plenty of time!”
16 hours later it has vanished from your mind. You go to bed. If
you’re lucky you wake up in a panic at 5:50am and do your pushups.
But probably you derail.

And you should derail. Since the deadline is “when you go to sleep” waking
up after you did that is actually too late so it is perfectly fair to
derail.

I think most helpful for us akratics is for the deadline to be

obvious, memorable, and very hard. So I like midnight, and I don’t
like it being customizable.

I’m trying with a “softer” approach to solve akrasia. Hard deadline are
really hard to really integrate in your life. You usually don’t obsessively
check your watch around midnight to know exactly how many minutes you’ve
got to finish the last page of the book you’re reading, for example.
If you’re behind on a goal it is much simpler and less stressful to stay
awake a little past your usual bedtime. This works as a “punishment” in the
behaviour training sense, since you get to associate “i didn’t do what i
needed to do” with “i’ll feel tired” and will subconsciously avoid doing it
again.

Another clarification about the supposed friendliness of this bug: If

you need one more pushup by the end of the day and you do that pushup
right after midnight and either TallyBee submits it or you enter it
with a caret (^) for “today” then your graph will freeze. It’s the new
day now and you were off the road on the emergency day and are off it
again now. The way to exploit the loophole is to catch up by doing
enough pushups that you’re back on the road for the day after the
emergency day.

So that’s why I think we need to fix this bug. It’s just too
confusing. It leads you to think that you have till 3am but it’s more
subtle than that.

Completely agree on this point. If you check the support request for my MIT
graph, you’ll find at least a couple of times when i did enter the data for
the day past midnight using the caret out of habit, freezing the graph by
mistake.

Ciao,
\Valerio De Camillis

[bee]

I’m totally unconvinced on this, people. I am often up much past
midnight myself, and I am always always always glad for the hard
deadline of midnight. Yes it is arbitrary, but at some point the hat
has to fall. Bedtime is much too mushy of a deadline, and I end up
just pushing bedtime back to fit in more stuff that I was supposed to
do (or easily could have done) earlier if I leave the deadline as
“before I go to bed”, and that does not improve my life.

I can count so many times I’ve done pushups, or gone for a run, or
published a blog post, or sat down to read with the midnight deadline
looming. I need that deadline razor sharp. Perhaps I am more
intractably akractic than some? I find that my personal akrasia
horizon is very short. Maybe even a matter of hours. I wake up to my
alarm at 6am and am totally convinced as I hit snooze and roll over
that I will go running this afternoon and that will be a more pleasant
and convenient time to do it. HA.

B

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Valerio De Camillis
worthstream@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 7:47 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I concur - esp because “bedtime” for me is often 3-4 am.
I’ve got my fitbit set to a different time zone to simulate this - esp
because I’m often switching time zones.

Changing timezone looks like a solution. A non user-friendly one, but it’s
something i’ll try when i get back to beeminding.

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:03 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

I used to think we really needed to let people customize the official
end of the day but I’m not so sure anymore.
If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business. If you’re a night
owl then you can stay up all night Monday night so the report’s done
by 5pm the next day. Same with Beeminder. If it gives you a deadline
of midnight and that’s like the middle of the day for you and you do
your best work after midnight, well, do your work after midnight. The
previous midnight, the one before the deadline.

The point is, deadlines are perfectly arbitrary. Changing from 3am to
midnight isn’t necessarily 3 fewer hours. Think of it as 21 more.

Not really, see what you did say about skirting the edge of the yellow brick
road vs. staying on the right side of the middle of the road: Being akratic
does not let you think rationally a day in advance.

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your
pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

WITH A CUSTOM END-OF-DAY AT, SAY, 6AM:
You’re in the wrong lane but you know you have all day and all night
tomorrow so no worries.
You wake up on the emergency day and think “I have to do pushups
before I go to bed tonight. Plenty of time!”
16 hours later it has vanished from your mind. You go to bed. If
you’re lucky you wake up in a panic at 5:50am and do your pushups.
But probably you derail.

And you should derail. Since the deadline is “when you go to sleep” waking
up after you did that is actually too late so it is perfectly fair to
derail.

I think most helpful for us akratics is for the deadline to be
obvious, memorable, and very hard. So I like midnight, and I don’t
like it being customizable.

I’m trying with a “softer” approach to solve akrasia. Hard deadline are
really hard to really integrate in your life. You usually don’t obsessively
check your watch around midnight to know exactly how many minutes you’ve got
to finish the last page of the book you’re reading, for example.
If you’re behind on a goal it is much simpler and less stressful to stay
awake a little past your usual bedtime. This works as a “punishment” in the
behaviour training sense, since you get to associate “i didn’t do what i
needed to do” with “i’ll feel tired” and will subconsciously avoid doing it
again.

Another clarification about the supposed friendliness of this bug: If
you need one more pushup by the end of the day and you do that pushup
right after midnight and either TallyBee submits it or you enter it
with a caret (^) for “today” then your graph will freeze. It’s the new
day now and you were off the road on the emergency day and are off it
again now. The way to exploit the loophole is to catch up by doing
enough pushups that you’re back on the road for the day after the
emergency day.

So that’s why I think we need to fix this bug. It’s just too
confusing. It leads you to think that you have till 3am but it’s more
subtle than that.

Completely agree on this point. If you check the support request for my MIT
graph, you’ll find at least a couple of times when i did enter the data for
the day past midnight using the caret out of habit, freezing the graph by
mistake.

Ciao,
\Valerio De Camillis

–
What are you beeminding?

Beeminder

[Paul_Fenwick]

im in ur thread, exposing ur typical mind fallacy.

Isn’t 3am (or a user-configurable time) also a razor-sharp enough deadline?

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Bethany M. Soule bsoule@gmail.com wrote:

I’m totally unconvinced on this, people. I am often up much past
midnight myself, and I am always always always glad for the hard
deadline of midnight. Yes it is arbitrary, but at some point the hat
has to fall. Bedtime is much too mushy of a deadline, and I end up
just pushing bedtime back to fit in more stuff that I was supposed to
do (or easily could have done) earlier if I leave the deadline as
“before I go to bed”, and that does not improve my life.

I can count so many times I’ve done pushups, or gone for a run, or
published a blog post, or sat down to read with the midnight deadline
looming. I need that deadline razor sharp. Perhaps I am more
intractably akractic than some? I find that my personal akrasia
horizon is very short. Maybe even a matter of hours. I wake up to my
alarm at 6am and am totally convinced as I hit snooze and roll over
that I will go running this afternoon and that will be a more pleasant
and convenient time to do it. HA.

B

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Valerio De Camillis
worthstream@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 7:47 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I concur - esp because “bedtime” for me is often 3-4 am.
I’ve got my fitbit set to a different time zone to simulate this - esp
because I’m often switching time zones.

Changing timezone looks like a solution. A non user-friendly one, but it’s
something i’ll try when i get back to beeminding.

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:03 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

I used to think we really needed to let people customize the official
end of the day but I’m not so sure anymore.
If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business. If you’re a night
owl then you can stay up all night Monday night so the report’s done
by 5pm the next day. Same with Beeminder. If it gives you a deadline
of midnight and that’s like the middle of the day for you and you do
your best work after midnight, well, do your work after midnight. The
previous midnight, the one before the deadline.

The point is, deadlines are perfectly arbitrary. Changing from 3am to
midnight isn’t necessarily 3 fewer hours. Think of it as 21 more.

Not really, see what you did say about skirting the edge of the yellow brick
road vs. staying on the right side of the middle of the road: Being akratic
does not let you think rationally a day in advance.

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your
pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

WITH A CUSTOM END-OF-DAY AT, SAY, 6AM:
You’re in the wrong lane but you know you have all day and all night
tomorrow so no worries.
You wake up on the emergency day and think “I have to do pushups
before I go to bed tonight. Plenty of time!”
16 hours later it has vanished from your mind. You go to bed. If
you’re lucky you wake up in a panic at 5:50am and do your pushups.
But probably you derail.

And you should derail. Since the deadline is “when you go to sleep” waking
up after you did that is actually too late so it is perfectly fair to
derail.

I think most helpful for us akratics is for the deadline to be
obvious, memorable, and very hard. So I like midnight, and I don’t
like it being customizable.

I’m trying with a “softer” approach to solve akrasia. Hard deadline are
really hard to really integrate in your life. You usually don’t obsessively
check your watch around midnight to know exactly how many minutes you’ve got
to finish the last page of the book you’re reading, for example.
If you’re behind on a goal it is much simpler and less stressful to stay
awake a little past your usual bedtime. This works as a “punishment” in the
behaviour training sense, since you get to associate “i didn’t do what i
needed to do” with “i’ll feel tired” and will subconsciously avoid doing it
again.

Another clarification about the supposed friendliness of this bug: If
you need one more pushup by the end of the day and you do that pushup
right after midnight and either TallyBee submits it or you enter it
with a caret (^) for “today” then your graph will freeze. It’s the new
day now and you were off the road on the emergency day and are off it
again now. The way to exploit the loophole is to catch up by doing
enough pushups that you’re back on the road for the day after the
emergency day.

So that’s why I think we need to fix this bug. It’s just too
confusing. It leads you to think that you have till 3am but it’s more
subtle than that.

Completely agree on this point. If you check the support request for my MIT
graph, you’ll find at least a couple of times when i did enter the data for
the day past midnight using the caret out of habit, freezing the graph by
mistake.

Ciao,
\Valerio De Camillis

–
What are you beeminding?
http://beeminder.com

[dreev]

I think Bethany’s point is really smart. You do need the deadline
razor sharp regardless. None of this “whenever I go to sleep”. You can
make it effectively “whenever I go to sleep” by making it an upper
bound on your bed time (eg, 6am) but it still has to be something
definitive. Which means it’s very likely to cause you to get less
sleep. This actually sounds like a good argument for making your
deadline a lower bound on your bedtime (eg, 9pm) so you never lose
sleep over your edge-skating.

But Valerio is making the interesting point that that’s good to lose
sleep over your edge-skating. It will help encourage you to be less of
an edge-skater. I’m not buying that though.

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:54 AM, Paul Fenwick paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com wrote:

im in ur thread, exposing ur typical mind fallacy.

Isn’t 3am (or a user-configurable time) also a razor-sharp enough deadline?

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Bethany M. Soule bsoule@gmail.com wrote:

I’m totally unconvinced on this, people. I am often up much past
midnight myself, and I am always always always glad for the hard
deadline of midnight. Yes it is arbitrary, but at some point the hat
has to fall. Bedtime is much too mushy of a deadline, and I end up
just pushing bedtime back to fit in more stuff that I was supposed to
do (or easily could have done) earlier if I leave the deadline as
“before I go to bed”, and that does not improve my life.

I can count so many times I’ve done pushups, or gone for a run, or
published a blog post, or sat down to read with the midnight deadline
looming. I need that deadline razor sharp. Perhaps I am more
intractably akractic than some? I find that my personal akrasia
horizon is very short. Maybe even a matter of hours. I wake up to my
alarm at 6am and am totally convinced as I hit snooze and roll over
that I will go running this afternoon and that will be a more pleasant
and convenient time to do it. HA.

B

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Valerio De Camillis
worthstream@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 7:47 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I concur - esp because “bedtime” for me is often 3-4 am.
I’ve got my fitbit set to a different time zone to simulate this - esp
because I’m often switching time zones.

Changing timezone looks like a solution. A non user-friendly one, but it’s
something i’ll try when i get back to beeminding.

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:03 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

I used to think we really needed to let people customize the official
end of the day but I’m not so sure anymore.
If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business. If you’re a night
owl then you can stay up all night Monday night so the report’s done
by 5pm the next day. Same with Beeminder. If it gives you a deadline
of midnight and that’s like the middle of the day for you and you do
your best work after midnight, well, do your work after midnight. The
previous midnight, the one before the deadline.

The point is, deadlines are perfectly arbitrary. Changing from 3am to
midnight isn’t necessarily 3 fewer hours. Think of it as 21 more.

Not really, see what you did say about skirting the edge of the yellow brick
road vs. staying on the right side of the middle of the road: Being akratic
does not let you think rationally a day in advance.

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your
pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

WITH A CUSTOM END-OF-DAY AT, SAY, 6AM:
You’re in the wrong lane but you know you have all day and all night
tomorrow so no worries.
You wake up on the emergency day and think “I have to do pushups
before I go to bed tonight. Plenty of time!”
16 hours later it has vanished from your mind. You go to bed. If
you’re lucky you wake up in a panic at 5:50am and do your pushups.
But probably you derail.

And you should derail. Since the deadline is “when you go to sleep” waking
up after you did that is actually too late so it is perfectly fair to
derail.

I think most helpful for us akratics is for the deadline to be
obvious, memorable, and very hard. So I like midnight, and I don’t
like it being customizable.

I’m trying with a “softer” approach to solve akrasia. Hard deadline are
really hard to really integrate in your life. You usually don’t obsessively
check your watch around midnight to know exactly how many minutes you’ve got
to finish the last page of the book you’re reading, for example.
If you’re behind on a goal it is much simpler and less stressful to stay
awake a little past your usual bedtime. This works as a “punishment” in the
behaviour training sense, since you get to associate “i didn’t do what i
needed to do” with “i’ll feel tired” and will subconsciously avoid doing it
again.

Another clarification about the supposed friendliness of this bug: If
you need one more pushup by the end of the day and you do that pushup
right after midnight and either TallyBee submits it or you enter it
with a caret (^) for “today” then your graph will freeze. It’s the new
day now and you were off the road on the emergency day and are off it
again now. The way to exploit the loophole is to catch up by doing
enough pushups that you’re back on the road for the day after the
emergency day.

So that’s why I think we need to fix this bug. It’s just too
confusing. It leads you to think that you have till 3am but it’s more
subtle than that.

Completely agree on this point. If you check the support request for my MIT
graph, you’ll find at least a couple of times when i did enter the data for
the day past midnight using the caret out of habit, freezing the graph by
mistake.

Ciao,
\Valerio De Camillis

–
What are you beeminding?
http://beeminder.com

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

[bee]

thanks for backing me up, D. Though paul is also right that having the
hard deadline configurable wouldn’t make it less razorsharp.

B

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

I think Bethany’s point is really smart. You do need the deadline
razor sharp regardless. None of this “whenever I go to sleep”. You can
make it effectively “whenever I go to sleep” by making it an upper
bound on your bed time (eg, 6am) but it still has to be something
definitive. Which means it’s very likely to cause you to get less
sleep. This actually sounds like a good argument for making your
deadline a lower bound on your bedtime (eg, 9pm) so you never lose
sleep over your edge-skating.

But Valerio is making the interesting point that that’s good to lose
sleep over your edge-skating. It will help encourage you to be less of
an edge-skater. I’m not buying that though.

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:54 AM, Paul Fenwick paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com wrote:

im in ur thread, exposing ur typical mind fallacy.

Isn’t 3am (or a user-configurable time) also a razor-sharp enough deadline?

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Bethany M. Soule bsoule@gmail.com wrote:

I’m totally unconvinced on this, people. I am often up much past
midnight myself, and I am always always always glad for the hard
deadline of midnight. Yes it is arbitrary, but at some point the hat
has to fall. Bedtime is much too mushy of a deadline, and I end up
just pushing bedtime back to fit in more stuff that I was supposed to
do (or easily could have done) earlier if I leave the deadline as
“before I go to bed”, and that does not improve my life.

I can count so many times I’ve done pushups, or gone for a run, or
published a blog post, or sat down to read with the midnight deadline
looming. I need that deadline razor sharp. Perhaps I am more
intractably akractic than some? I find that my personal akrasia
horizon is very short. Maybe even a matter of hours. I wake up to my
alarm at 6am and am totally convinced as I hit snooze and roll over
that I will go running this afternoon and that will be a more pleasant
and convenient time to do it. HA.

B

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Valerio De Camillis
worthstream@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 7:47 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com wrote:

I concur - esp because “bedtime” for me is often 3-4 am.
I’ve got my fitbit set to a different time zone to simulate this - esp
because I’m often switching time zones.

Changing timezone looks like a solution. A non user-friendly one, but it’s
something i’ll try when i get back to beeminding.

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:03 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

I used to think we really needed to let people customize the official
end of the day but I’m not so sure anymore.
If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business. If you’re a night
owl then you can stay up all night Monday night so the report’s done
by 5pm the next day. Same with Beeminder. If it gives you a deadline
of midnight and that’s like the middle of the day for you and you do
your best work after midnight, well, do your work after midnight. The
previous midnight, the one before the deadline.

The point is, deadlines are perfectly arbitrary. Changing from 3am to
midnight isn’t necessarily 3 fewer hours. Think of it as 21 more.

Not really, see what you did say about skirting the edge of the yellow brick
road vs. staying on the right side of the middle of the road: Being akratic
does not let you think rationally a day in advance.

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your
pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

WITH A CUSTOM END-OF-DAY AT, SAY, 6AM:
You’re in the wrong lane but you know you have all day and all night
tomorrow so no worries.
You wake up on the emergency day and think “I have to do pushups
before I go to bed tonight. Plenty of time!”
16 hours later it has vanished from your mind. You go to bed. If
you’re lucky you wake up in a panic at 5:50am and do your pushups.
But probably you derail.

And you should derail. Since the deadline is “when you go to sleep” waking
up after you did that is actually too late so it is perfectly fair to
derail.

I think most helpful for us akratics is for the deadline to be
obvious, memorable, and very hard. So I like midnight, and I don’t
like it being customizable.

I’m trying with a “softer” approach to solve akrasia. Hard deadline are
really hard to really integrate in your life. You usually don’t obsessively
check your watch around midnight to know exactly how many minutes you’ve got
to finish the last page of the book you’re reading, for example.
If you’re behind on a goal it is much simpler and less stressful to stay
awake a little past your usual bedtime. This works as a “punishment” in the
behaviour training sense, since you get to associate “i didn’t do what i
needed to do” with “i’ll feel tired” and will subconsciously avoid doing it
again.

Another clarification about the supposed friendliness of this bug: If
you need one more pushup by the end of the day and you do that pushup
right after midnight and either TallyBee submits it or you enter it
with a caret (^) for “today” then your graph will freeze. It’s the new
day now and you were off the road on the emergency day and are off it
again now. The way to exploit the loophole is to catch up by doing
enough pushups that you’re back on the road for the day after the
emergency day.

So that’s why I think we need to fix this bug. It’s just too
confusing. It leads you to think that you have till 3am but it’s more
subtle than that.

Completely agree on this point. If you check the support request for my MIT
graph, you’ll find at least a couple of times when i did enter the data for
the day past midnight using the caret out of habit, freezing the graph by
mistake.

Ciao,
\Valerio De Camillis

–
What are you beeminding?
http://beeminder.com

–
http://dreev.es – search://“Daniel Reeves”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

–
What are you beeminding?

Beeminder

[Paul_Fenwick]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Bethany M. Soule bsoule@gmail.com wrote:

thanks for backing me up, D. Though paul is also right that having the
hard deadline configurable wouldn’t make it less razorsharp.

To be honest I’m happy to adopt almost any position provided it means
I get to keep the terribly useful “accidental feature” of being able
to re-rail early in the morning. I’m not one to let my personal
beliefs stand in the way of personal utility.

Paul

[mel]

I also agree that a hard deadline is needed, but the midnight/3 am
thing does cause confusion, even if it’s a helpful loophole. I like
the idea of a configurable deadline though. The deadline is when the
graph refreshes, so you pick the time you want and then it’s really
razor sharp. I’ve taken midnight lightly and 3 am ends up being my
real end of day, so it’d be better if I could either make midnight
have more teeth or just pick a later time legitimately.

I also have a really short akrasia horizon, only minutes when I’m
trying to get somewhere on time. Even minutes for how I’m going to do
a workout “as soon as I …”. I will do other things I don’t have to
do while putting off showering, changing, eating breakfast, etc. I
will convince myself literally up until the last minute that I’m still
going to pull it off and make it out the door on time - or if not
that, drive a little faster and get lucky with green lights to make up
for it. It’s quite ridiculous. I clearly get some kind of rush out
of operating like that. I do enjoy the “game” of seeing if I can make
the ETA creep to an earlier time on the GPS.

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Paul Fenwick paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com wrote:

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Bethany M. Soule bsoule@gmail.com wrote:

thanks for backing me up, D. Though paul is also right that having the
hard deadline configurable wouldn’t make it less razorsharp.

To be honest I’m happy to adopt almost any position provided it means
I get to keep the terribly useful “accidental feature” of being able
to re-rail early in the morning. I’m not one to let my personal
beliefs stand in the way of personal utility.

Paul

–
Melanie Reeves Wicklow

MelzaFit

707-853-2831

[Valerio_De_Camillis]

One of the greatest things about Beeminder is that it’s a tool, not a fixed
process.
It’s flexible enough that you can use it both ways, with “hard” or “soft”
deadlines.

When i was beeminding i did commit to do at least three “important tasks”
per day. Since i do prefer the “softer” approach of setting the end of the
day at the time i g to sleep, i usually just reported tasks completed after
midnight but before bedtime in the day before.

It is cheating? Maybe. It is if you think that the rule is “do something
before midnight”, it is not if you think that the rule is “do something
before bedtime” but the tool you use to track it has the limitation of
being built with the former rule in mind.

So, Beeminder is a tool. It is a tool built with a specific way to use it
in mind, but if you want to use it another way there’s nothing to stop you.

However it would be interesting to know how many users use Beeminder this
“softer” way since, Daniel and Bethany, you’re building a tool for the
community not just for yourselves, aren’t you?

Ciao,
\ Valerio De Camillis

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 9:25 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.comwrote:

I think Bethany’s point is really smart. You do need the deadline
razor sharp regardless. None of this “whenever I go to sleep”. You can
make it effectively “whenever I go to sleep” by making it an upper
bound on your bed time (eg, 6am) but it still has to be something
definitive. Which means it’s very likely to cause you to get less
sleep. This actually sounds like a good argument for making your
deadline a lower bound on your bedtime (eg, 9pm) so you never lose
sleep over your edge-skating.

But Valerio is making the interesting point that that’s good to lose
sleep over your edge-skating. It will help encourage you to be less of
an edge-skater. I’m not buying that though.

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:54 AM, Paul Fenwick paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com
wrote:

im in ur thread, exposing ur typical mind fallacy.

Isn’t 3am (or a user-configurable time) also a razor-sharp enough
deadline?

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 11:28 AM, Bethany M. Soule bsoule@gmail.com
wrote:

I’m totally unconvinced on this, people. I am often up much past
midnight myself, and I am always always always glad for the hard
deadline of midnight. Yes it is arbitrary, but at some point the hat
has to fall. Bedtime is much too mushy of a deadline, and I end up
just pushing bedtime back to fit in more stuff that I was supposed to
do (or easily could have done) earlier if I leave the deadline as
“before I go to bed”, and that does not improve my life.

I can count so many times I’ve done pushups, or gone for a run, or
published a blog post, or sat down to read with the midnight deadline
looming. I need that deadline razor sharp. Perhaps I am more
intractably akractic than some? I find that my personal akrasia
horizon is very short. Maybe even a matter of hours. I wake up to my
alarm at 6am and am totally convinced as I hit snooze and roll over
that I will go running this afternoon and that will be a more pleasant
and convenient time to do it. HA.

B

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Valerio De Camillis
worthstream@gmail.com wrote:

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 7:47 PM, Apneet Jolly jolly@ajollylife.com
wrote:

I concur - esp because “bedtime” for me is often 3-4 am.
I’ve got my fitbit set to a different time zone to simulate this - esp
because I’m often switching time zones.

Changing timezone looks like a solution. A non user-friendly one, but
it’s
something i’ll try when i get back to beeminding.

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:03 PM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com
wrote:

I used to think we really needed to let people customize the official
end of the day but I’m not so sure anymore.
If your boss needs a report by close of business on Tuesday, you don’t
quibble about what you consider close of business. If you’re a night
owl then you can stay up all night Monday night so the report’s done
by 5pm the next day. Same with Beeminder. If it gives you a deadline
of midnight and that’s like the middle of the day for you and you do
your best work after midnight, well, do your work after midnight. The
previous midnight, the one before the deadline.

The point is, deadlines are perfectly arbitrary. Changing from 3am to
midnight isn’t necessarily 3 fewer hours. Think of it as 21 more.

Not really, see what you did say about skirting the edge of the yellow
brick
road vs. staying on the right side of the middle of the road: Being
akratic
does not let you think rationally a day in advance.

The counterargument is that perhaps it’s easy to remember to do your
pushups before bed but not easy to remember to do them by some
arbitrary time in the middle of the evening (like midnight).

WITH A CUSTOM END-OF-DAY AT, SAY, 6AM:
You’re in the wrong lane but you know you have all day and all night
tomorrow so no worries.
You wake up on the emergency day and think “I have to do pushups
before I go to bed tonight. Plenty of time!”
16 hours later it has vanished from your mind. You go to bed. If
you’re lucky you wake up in a panic at 5:50am and do your pushups.
But probably you derail.

And you should derail. Since the deadline is “when you go to sleep”
waking
up after you did that is actually too late so it is perfectly fair to
derail.

I think most helpful for us akratics is for the deadline to be
obvious, memorable, and very hard. So I like midnight, and I don’t
like it being customizable.

I’m trying with a “softer” approach to solve akrasia. Hard deadline are
really hard to really integrate in your life. You usually don’t
obsessively
check your watch around midnight to know exactly how many minutes
you’ve got
to finish the last page of the book you’re reading, for example.
If you’re behind on a goal it is much simpler and less stressful to
stay
awake a little past your usual bedtime. This works as a “punishment”
in the
behaviour training sense, since you get to associate “i didn’t do what
i
needed to do” with “i’ll feel tired” and will subconsciously avoid
doing it
again.

Another clarification about the supposed friendliness of this bug: If
you need one more pushup by the end of the day and you do that pushup
right after midnight and either TallyBee submits it or you enter it
with a caret (^) for “today” then your graph will freeze. It’s the new
day now and you were off the road on the emergency day and are off it
again now. The way to exploit the loophole is to catch up by doing
enough pushups that you’re back on the road for the day after the
emergency day.

So that’s why I think we need to fix this bug. It’s just too
confusing. It leads you to think that you have till 3am but it’s more
subtle than that.

Completely agree on this point. If you check the support request for
my MIT
graph, you’ll find at least a couple of times when i did enter the
data for
the day past midnight using the caret out of habit, freezing the graph
by
mistake.

Ciao,
\Valerio De Camillis

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