That’s a delicate question. My initial reaction is that I should probably have it capped lower, actually. My main failure mode with support zero is that I just forget about it. Derailing is almost never a conscious decision of weighing pro-and-con and deciding to pay, and so it tends to just feel punitive.
Now, I know that @dreev is going “well make it expensive enough and you won’t forget about it!”. I forgot about it at $270. And I can still remember pretty vividly how horrible that felt. So there’s something wrong with this goal, but I don’t know what. And it is really valuable for keeping things from starving in support.
Totally random: what about a chrome extension that links a particular
beeminder goal to a particular url? So if you’re in gmail, you’d be able
to see that you’re going to derail or something. This is probably
impractical but kind of interesting. If more than one person replies to
this idea though, take it to a different thread probably./
Derailing via forgetting always feels awful and we encourage users to reply to the legit check in that case and say what happened. Note the rule of thumb in blog.beeminder.com/legit about not calling a derailment legit if the platonic ideal of Beeminder would’ve prevented it. My favorite long-term solution to this problem involves the reminders revamp and making it very easy to stagger all your deadlines throughout the day. @NickWolf calls this a Beeminder waterfall. You won’t ever forget about a beemergency because there’s always some upcoming beemergency. (:
I’m down with the waterfall idea but support zero is usually the beginning of the waterfall. How do I cue myself for that?? At the moment I have a recurring alarm set on my phone for 1pm to remind me of the support zero emergency. It didn’t exactly help on Friday when it went off as I was biking up the Broadway bridge, however – if it had actually been an eep day, I’d have derailed because it was about 1:40 by the time I got home.
Also a waterfall seems like it’d work much better as a cascade of fairly small and constrained tasks… a lot of my beeminder ones are things like “do 3-5 hours worth of work”.