I will start the description of my current setup with this most meta goal of mine. It tracks the sum of the “due in X days” for the soonest-due 10 goals.
Well, when I say, “it tracks”, it’s disinformation because for the almost 8 years that I have had this, I didn’t think of a proper way to automate it. But I am now used to counting it manually real quickly.
I am just summing the number of days in which the goal is due (actually, “min” of that and “10”) for the 10 goals that are due the soonest. Well, not all, because some are deliberately set to edge-skate, but I am using the tags and the AltBee interface to group the goals in a way that I get the goals of the type together. Mostly those where I might want to do the required thing once every several days but I don’t care on which day exactly (yoga, blogging). And those where I want to do almost every day but it doesn’t matter if I skip one (mostly set to 5.5-6/7 to compensate for the skipped days over time) (anki reviews). And those where it doesn’t matter if I do one big binge or tiny bites every day (processing my photos backlog).
So, without this meta goal, I would just let all those goals skate to “due today” and only do them when they are in the red. Which is a bit too much stress for me, having >10 goals in the red every day. With the meta goal, on the other hand, I still get to do the average of what is to be done for those goals every day, but since I have some buffer on most of them every single day, I can choose more of what to do on that specific day. Like, work through more of my photos backlog or spend more minutes on language revision?
The slope is set to 0.1/day, just because beeminder doesn’t work well with 0/day odometer-type goals. The effect of pushing to do more is mostly not from the slope but from the fact that the sum naturally deteriorates from day to day. As you can see, every single day I start with -8 to -10 from where the red line is. And if I go above the red line, it ratchets to keep only 2 points in the piggy bank.
Do I sometimes abuse the fact that it’s not autodata? Yes, I do. But it’s still one goal that helped with my beeminder use to maximize the awesomeness without unnecessarily overwhelming me, over all those years.
Initially, I thought that the aim would be to strive to reach 100. But reaching the 90s, the choice of “which of my goals I will work on more today” disappears, as I have to bring every single one of them to “due in 10 days” at least. So, it turned out to work most effectively when I am dancing in the 50s-80s.