I have goals like this, too—/slick (akin to @phi’s look presentable goal) and /timeboxing (plan my day in the morning). These goals are quite regularly red the day before it makes any sense to do them (that is, I’ve already planned my day and made myself presentable, and yet after ~9:30am the goals are red for the rest of the day).
The point is that “due in less than 24 hours” and “due today” are, for some of us, often two different things, and we’d really like to be able to easily see the second as well as the first.
Also, when you have many different deadlines (think: deadline waterfall), as things currently stand there’s no way to see what exactly is going on with your day at a glance. Of course, you can figure it out, but you have to stare to figure it out, not glance. And when money’s on the line and the day is hectic, being able to take things in at a glance becomes quite important.
I think there are three factors that feed into a need for this feature. If none of these are true for you, you aren’t likely to see a need for this feature. But for those of us who these do apply to, something like this would be incredibly useful.
- You have many varied and non-midnight deadlines.
- You have a lot of goals.
- You tend to edge-skate.
If none of these things apply to you, it’s pretty simple to keep what you need to do today in your head, and the current UI is more than sufficient to communicate what you need to know.
If, however, these conditions do apply to you, you’re going to have a hard time keeping every goal due today and its respective deadline in your head, and the current UI is pretty handicapped in its ability to communicate that to you quickly. In the end, that means Beeminder’s threat becomes fuzzy, preventing it from having the influence it should on your life.
My goal is that every time I derail it’s due to a conscious calculation. Missing a deadline because it’s unclear to me what’s due when is not a conscious calculation. It’s not a valuable way to derail, so it should be minimized.