Hi folks, I’m the one who cobbled together the autodialer for myself a few years ago. Here are a few thoughts on how I tend to use it personally.
A Max is a Must
For one, all of my goals have a max (or min, if it’s a do-less) beyond which the auto-dialler will never take me. If I cap my goal at 100 thingamabobs per week, even if I’m averaging a thousand, it will never change my rate to be harder than 100.
Working Up to a Daily Habit
I use it even with goals that I want to be doing daily. Not because I want it to be making me do daily things more than once per day, but because if I’m starting with a new habit, going straight to “No problem, I can do this every day” is probably unrealistic for me. I need to get into the flow of the habit, discover what the obstacles are and what plan-Bs are needed and etc., so I use the auto-dialler to work myself up to 1/day, rather than using it to push me past it. Then it just caps at 1 per day when I get to that rate.
Sometimes I Need to Hit the Breaks
Sometimes I go through a period of doing way more on a goal and it turns out not to be sustainable, even if my max was set above that number. In those cases, I just set a break on the goal for a couple of weeks with a lower rate. That brings my average down again and makes it more sustainable until I can work myself back up again in a more sustainable way. This has helped me find a more reasonable, actual max when my ambitions were unrealistic or became unsustainable. I’m only ever locked in for a week, so the worst case scenario is that I have to continue at my average rate for one more week before the break that slows it down again starts.
I Like a Longer Assessment Time
I’ve tried autodialling my goals to the most recent week and to the most recent 2, 3, and 4 weeks. I prefer 4 weeks. I find 28 days to be a long enough cycle for many of my goals to give me a good feel for what I can do overall. Each week is too variable for me to really want to be forced to keep up with a particularly good week. If I had to continue keeping up with working out as much while working, for instance, as I can when I’m on vacation because my road got set to its highest then, that would be… non-ideal.
That Said…
Sometimes I want to ramp up more quickly on a given goal and am impatient to see it improve, especially if it’s something I’ve been neglecting for a long time. (These are the goals I’d otherwise be tempted to try to jump straight to my ideal and then find it very hard to maintain because it turns out that habits are often harder than we think they’ll be.) For these, I tend to just set an autoratchet (a.k.a. max safety buffer) so that it keeps me working on it regularly, even if I can easily stay above the initial rate and am impatient to be accountable for something more ambitious.
Set It and Forget It
I love not having to think about whether I’m being unrealistic, about how hard it’s going to be, or about how long it should take to get better for this particular goal. I like setting my dream rate and then, for the most part, not having to think about it at all beyond that.
No More Face-Plants
When I want to start a goal with a bang (which, in the past, has resulted in me overcommitting, being bummed out, taking two (or five) steps back, etc.) I have to lead with action. “Oh really? You think you can do 150 of these a day when your max for all of last month was 12? Well, if you want that rate, I guess you’ll have to push yourself to do more right away so you can get there, won’t you?”
All Gain, No Pain
What I love most is that when I improve a bit, I maintain that improvement. It’s a really gentle approach that keeps nudging me to be more and more consistent, more and more ambitious, and closer and closer to what I want, but only by making me keep up the improvements I’ve already made. I love seeing the notice on my autodialling page that tells me that I’ve hit my target max rate after working on a goal for a while and knowing that it was done in a sustainable enough way that I can just keep on going with it.
Anyway, YMMV but I’ve loved its effect on my goals.