It’d be amazing if we could increase the total due on a goal for just one day.
Let’s say I have a rescuetime goal to log two daily hours on my writing app, but I have meeting coming up for which it’d be useful to put some extra time in. I don’t want to increase my goal (two hours per day is plenty for the most part), and ratcheting won’t help me as it’ll just get rid of my buffer days and leave me with my two regular, required hours. I could do the two hours and ratchet myself again, but odds are I won’t really want to do that, after having done the first two hours.
Suggestion: A Day Dialer, where you can set the day’s goal without affecting the general slope. I set the Dialer to 5 hours (you’d have to pick a number higher than the minimum that you’re required to do at the time, of course) and I now have to put in the additional time at the risk of derailing. Come the next day I’m right back to only needing to do two hours per day. If we could schedule this (setting it up the day before, for example) it’d be even sicker.
Don’t know about everyone else, I’m always at an impasse between setting my goals too low (and not pushing myself enough) or too high (and getting screwed over on days in which I’m busier), and something like this would go a long way to alleviating that issue. I’d be glad to pay for something of the sort on one of the premium plans.
You can fake this with graph.beeminder.com (and I do, frequently!). Log in, select the goal in question, and switch to the Graph Editor tab.
Click the “plus” icon twice to the right of whatever row includes “right now” (note that the first column is end date for all but the first row!). Make both be today, then make the second new row’s value higher. Note that for each row, two of the fields are inputs and the third is an output, indicated by being grayed out - clicking a grayed out cell switches it from output to input, so you can specify that new value.
As an example, here’s my music goal before I make any edits:
(I don’t actually want to do an extra hour today, so I’m not Submitting this change, so if you look at the live graph[bmndr] you won’t see this change reflected).
Notice that this didn’t mess with the upcoming break, except insofar as it’s higher up now. If you have graph lines coming up that are specified in terms of value rather than rate (note the grayed out columns), those will need to be adjusted to compensate, unless you don’t want them to — you should at least consider it, I guess is my point.
Be careful with this tool, as you can easily cause yourself to insta-derail (or at least have a physically impossible amount of work to do), but it’s also very powerful at getting your red line to do exactly what you want. All changes are stored locally and are Undoable until you click submit, so as long as you’re careful with that button, you can fiddle around to your heart’s content!
Absolutely, glad I could be of help! You can also use the graph editor to add or adjust unusual breaks or other complex rate-changing tasks for which a 7-day lag on commitment or a ratchet aren’t quite the right things. It still prevents you from making anything easier inside the akrasia horizon, of course!
