The goal total may not always be the goal total

Bugabee
1

bugabee
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You can get yourself in a state where the goal total isn’t actually the goal total. This one is an edge case, since I’m doing odd things.

I’m also not 100% sure what should happen here.

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Make a goal with 7 days of safety buffer.
  2. Use the commitment dial to set the goal total to 1 and the end date to just after the Akrasia Horizon.
  3. Trim down the safety buffer with Ratchet to one day.

Expectation:

A goal requiring one datapoint tomorrow (the intent) OR a goal reporting a goal total of 7.

Result:

A goal that says its goal total is 1, but the real goal total is 7. The red line keeps rising past the goal total.

1 Like
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This goal has a goal date set. With a goal date set, your goal is active until the goal date is reached.

3

For example, if you said you want to get to a total of 100 by 20th May, then the goal will continue until 20th May even if you’ve already hit 100, but it won’t require more data.

Your link implies I should not have derailed. I said I want to get to a total of 1 by 29th Oct, then the goal continued until 29th Oct even though I already hit 1, but it required more data.

4

I believe we’ve been discussing this via email, so just to clarify for everyone else: a new goal was created and then an end total of 1 set… for outside the akrasia horizon. In the meantime, the goal had a rate of 1/day.

So the way it worked was that the goal continued at a rate of 1/day until the akrasia horizon, and then the line dropped back down to 1.

This is expected, because the goal started with a rate of 1/day and you can’t change that until after the akrasia horizon. The end total is still 1, but it requires the line to drop again at the end in order to achieve that, because the line continues at a rate of 1/day until the akrasia horizon.

Trying to do this will often simply error out the graph, because we don’t support one-time goals in this way, or any goals shorter than 7 days.

You can see one workaround for this on a goal I just created, shanaqui/thebookshopbelow. The steps:

  • Create a goal with a low rate, lower than you want to achieve in a single day over the next week;
  • Go to the graph editor, and set a graph segment at the end date you want, with the goal total you want;
  • For the final segment, set it to be outside the akrasia horizon, and then a rate of 0.

So specifically for this example:

  • Created a goal with a rate of 3 pages/day;
  • Created a graph segment with a date of 2025-09-30 and a total of 500;
  • Changed the end segment to a date of 2025-10-03 and a rate of 0.

This will allow a goal to reach an end total within the akrasia horizon without making the goal easier, but still ending on the date/total you want.

1 Like
5

I believe we’ve been discussing this via email

Yeah, I didn’t want to clog support inboxes with protracted discussion on something which isn’t a big deal.

6

The goal’s “road” can be defined by any combination of two of the following: goal rate, goal value, and goal date.
Having set a goal date, this goal would continue being active until that date has been reached, regardless of the datapoints supplied (or not) along the way.
As you can see in the graph you posted, there is a target at Y 1 at X Sept 29. As for the rate between the start and finish, that can vary.
Entering the value 1 on Sept 22 does not finish the goal: up arriving at the goal date of Sept 29, the goal would end.
As for derailing, the rate had already been defined at what looks like +1/day and your datapoint on Sept 23 fell short of meeting that rate.