Restarting my $810 proj240 goal this week! This will be the third round - the first two were very successful and I got a ton of work done!
BUT - last time I ended up snoozing till 6am, and for a few days I was staying up till 6am every night! Essentially, if snoozing is allowed, 6am is the “real” deadline, so an edge-skater like me will eventually push it right to the 6am edge. @dreev
So, to prevent this from happening this week, I am adding a new rule - snoozing is losing! If I snooze even by 1 minute I lose! And - I have to finish all the work by 11pm each day!
Hopefully putting this in writing on the forum will help me commit to this!
Moved it back to 11 for today. I had hoped to make it by 9 today but I got a late start. I couldn’t sleep last night and then went back to sleep. I also have a physical therapy appointment and I’m running late for it so I probably won’t get home in time to finish by 9.
PS: I just read it more closely and I think if I were allowed to adjudicate you might have some wiggle room on not snoozing it past the deadline you originally committed to. If you’d wanted to rule that out it would’ve made sense to explicitly reaffirm the commitment when you moved the deadline to 9pm. Since you didn’t do that, there’s some reasonable doubt, maybe, I’m not sure…
I believe that you are overthinking everything. Set a realistic, possible, doable deadline 99+% of the time, whatever suits you, create your rules. Then stick to it, and pay if you derail.
Oh man I do this exact thing (pre-checking) on a couple of my goals, and I can’t decide if it’s A Problem I don’t think it’s really a Problem for my toothbrushing goal (I check it off before I go upstairs for bed, because as Beeminder support can testify, I never ever remember to check it off once I’m upstairs!) because if I pre-check but don’t actually brush my teeth, I make sure I derail the next day. It’s also a pretty low priority goal
But for my “bedtime routine” goal, the actual time of the deadline is important, and I keep skating the edge by checking it off and THEN doing my routine. I started doing it when my daughter started taking hours to go to sleep, so I legit didn’t have time to do the whole routine by 9:30pm, but the habit has stuck even on nights when she falls asleep quickly, and even after I shifted the deadline to 10pm I’m thinking maybe I should just lower the slope to something where I can meet the original deadline even with the more-than-occasional “bad night”.
If it’s not a problem now, and it becomes a problem in the future, you’ll regret not taking the smidgen of effort to fix up the deadline before it became a problem!
You lost me there!
I don’t think it’s really a Problem for my toothbrushing goal (I check it off before I go upstairs for bed, because as Beeminder support can testify, I never ever remember to check it off once I’m upstairs!) because if I pre-check but don’t actually brush my teeth, I make sure I derail the next day. It’s also a pretty low priority goal 
I’m thinking maybe I should just lower the slope to something where I can meet the original deadline even with the more-than-occasional “bad night”.