Thoughts on having a variable in the "deadline" field

[This is just a super low-priority thing that crossed my mind.]

I’m curious about your thoughts on the usefulness/ease-of-implementation of a non-static deadline in the case of t o’clock type goals.

I have a number of goals to get me to do things either earlier and earlier (say start work by t, eat no later that x, turn off screens by x, go to bed by z). The deadlines for these goals become quickly useless, though, since the changing requirement is actually a changing deadline, and so the “due in hh:mm:ss” can match the actual deadline of the first day, but is false the next day, unless you change the deadlines daily.

I’m wondering about a goal type where we could connect the deadline to the value required that day. If the required deadline is 12.50 (because you have to go to bed at 12:30), then the deadline would change to 12:30. The next day, when the required datapoint has to be under 12.35, the deadline would be 12:21am.

Like I said, just a thing that crossed my mind.

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If I understand you correctly, this is a pain point I deal with a lot since I’ve had a lot of these “do N hours of X” goals, where N varies from day-to-day. The fact that Beeminder isn’t smart about knowing what the effective deadline is means that it’s a lot harder to keep on top of these types of goals. Derails happen because it wasn’t clear when things needed to happen, not because I made a decision to derail.

Probably related:

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I think this is somewhat related to Precommitting to data points . If that scheme existed, then you could add precommit data points for each of your things and if you don’t actually do them then the goal derails at exactly that time.

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Ooh, that’s super intriguing! Being able to precommit to a datapoint would be really cool, especially when you want to do more than a goal strictly requires. If I could have done something like “I commit to entering a datapoint of 7 by 6pm today,” that would have pretty much obsoleted my old worktime commitments goal.

Tangentially related to the topic of this thread: another diatribe against things that cause derails by confusion instead of calculation:

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Sorry, I’m not sure I understand this. So these variables change with time? Do you have it planned out how they change (like, say, go to bed 5 minutes earlier each week for the next 6 months)? or is it something where you change it a little and then decide later when it’s time to change it again?

I don’t understand what you mean about the deadline being connected to the value required. How is the value required determined? Where is that stored?

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