I recently set a few goals as “weekends off” for the first time. I remember seeing the warning that I should change my rate to daily. But I had no idea why I should do that, and I thought, “but I want to do this three times a week”, so I didn’t change it. A few days after I set weekends off, I noticed that the slope of my line during the week didn’t change (it should be steeper since I want to get the same amount done but in fewer days)! Then I stumbled across a thread here about weekends off and it finally clicked why I needed to change the rate to days! The thing is… even if I had followed the original advice and changed the rate to “daily”, I still wouldn’t have understood why. But after reading that thread, I get that if I want to do something three times a week, during the weekdays only, then I need to set the daily rate to 3/5 (not 3/7).
What a surprising and nasty papercut! It would’ve been so easy for me to just go along with the effectively-lessened rate without even noticing! But the fact that I have to hold Beeminder’s hand to tell it how much I actually want to do it based on the working days is salt in the wound! I really love Beeminder but that was not fun.