I love this yellow brick staircase idea. (Thank you, @mwalla! Btw, DM me a snail-mail address if you’d like stickers!) We were philosophizing about it more today while thinking about how to make weekends-off less cumbersome in the upcoming fancy road editor. I was thinking about how to generalize the staircase idea even further…
First a recap of continuous beeminding: You’re playing a flappy-bird game where your real-world activity keeps your datapoint jumping up as time forces it inexorably to the right. You have to always stay above the road. Collide with it and you die. Very intuitive so far.
But it’s important to have daily deadlines and sometimes weekends off. So, like @mwalla suggests, the road is actually always a staircase, not a line. By default it steps up every day at a particular time. So the current Beeminder is equivalent to continuous beeminding with a day-based staircase. We then just generalize that further to allow staircases within staircases. At the macro-level you have a weekly staircase with how much is due by Friday each week. Within the week you have a micro-staircase forcing daily progress on workdays. And maybe a micro-micro staircase to force hourly progress during business hours.
If you really wanted you could even go to the other extreme and have a single giant step up in a year to have your 1000-page book written or whatever.
The point is it’s an infinitely customizable nannybot enforcing progress on any timeline at any granularity you choose.
Nudge! That reminds me of @alys’s 1000 Days of Fruits and Vegetables | Beeminder Blog