Pretty please with a cherry on top!
Retroratchet is a little off. It ignores what the user has entered in the
road dial, paying attention only to the current road rate. This means that
we end up with different end goal amounts or end date amounts on any goal
where that’s the primary piece of important information. (An inbox zero
retroratchet to a negative number should never happen if the road is
dialled to a date and a goal total of 0 or to a goal total of zero and a
rate.) This happens whether retroratcheted or activated by safe days. This
means that although you can alter the road dial after a manual
retroratchet, the first week (the one that can’t be changed because of the
akrasia horizon) will be wrong. It also means that if you don’t notice that
safe days has kicked in, you can end up with absurd (or even if it’s just
plain wrong) goals for your road.
The other thing is a request, rather than a fix. The new safe days for “do
less” goals is nice because it’s consistent with the “do more” as it uses
days instead of units (and on the old prompt, the text said days while the
system used units, which was confusing). But… I miss having the units
option. Would we be able to have both? When it comes to “do less” goals, I
often want to carry a certain specific balance and figuring out how many
days that amounts to is a little annoying. Alternatively, could you pop a
little box beside the “how many days do we want to have safe” box that
outputs the number of units this will leave us with? E.g., let’s say I have
a goal to do something no more than 15 times in a week, but I want to carry
a balance of 4 when I get on a streak. When I enter “2” in the number of
safe days box, if there were a little dialogue that said, “Based on your
current road rate, this will leave you with 4.29 units”. For many of these
it’s obvious to figure out, but for others it would just be a nice way to
make it quicker and cleaner. (I have something that I want a max of 84 of
over the year, but want to carry a balance of 37. I have to break out the
calculator to get the days in the ballpark. It’s easy enough, but would be
easier if it were already just right there… and even easier if I could
just enter “37” units.)
Also, if retroratchetting twice breaks everything and bugs the graphs (e.g.
if we make a mistake if we guestimate the number of days we need to get
certain number of units b/c we’re lazy… ahem…) please fix it so that we
either can’t do it, or so that it no longer breaks it.
Have a Happy New Year’s guys. Thanks for having put this together. I have a
feeling many of us will be inputing our upcoming resolutions over the next
couple of days and will be grateful to have Beeminder to keep us on track!