I don’t have the same strong feelings since I kind of love edge-skating TagTime goals and seeing the probability change and strategizing about it and everything.
And if you don’t like that, there’s Bee’s workaround (I guess I’ve only discussed this in a beemail so far [1]) of having another goal measured in something like tocks that makes the TagTime goal non-constraining.
In any case, this might be a prereq:
See also:
[1] daily beemail: bee & byorgey & beemergency tagtime pings
Bethany has 7 emergency TagTime pings on her bmndr.co/b/meta goal today, so, first of all, keep an eye on that and claim her $90 bounty in case she doesn’t make it. Currently a 0.03% chance if (which is a ginormous if) she stays 100% focused from now until her 6am deadline. If she stays focused straight through till midnight there’s a 94.5% chance she’ll make it. Also a big if. Maybe 11pm is almost realistic, and gives her time to dispatch her other beemergencies due at midnight. That has an 89% chance. Of course eking back onto the road at the end of the day means the beemergency repeats the next day.
Personally I love work days with ping beemergencies. I get hyperfocused and tend to like that kind of stress. (“OMG a ping could happen at any moment and I better be working!”) But Bee is slightly more normal in this regard and does not like to work that way. Using any other form of time tracking is a nonstarter for all the reasons we talk about in messymatters.com/tagtime so Bee came up with a way to have the best of both worlds: she just has a tocks goal – blog.beeminder.com/tocks – that requires somewhat more time than the TagTime goal. That way she still gets TagTime for tracking but there’s always plenty of safety buffer. She skates the edge of the tocks goal but those beemergencies are much less stressful since you know exactly what you have to do.
Except at some point she forgot and dialed down the tocks goal without changing the TagTime goal, or vice versa, and the safety buffer gradually dwindled until, here we are.
And that reminded me of a brilliant Beeminder goal that Brent Yorgey describes in his amazing guest post about his fifty active Beeminder goals – blog.beeminder.com/fifty – which I shall reproduce here:
After several very annoying episodes of forgetting to dial down my goals before a vacation or some other exceptional circumstance I decided the solution was to make yet another goal, to dial my Beeminder roads weekly [beeminder.com/byorgey/dial]. To get a point, I have to look at a calendar and put in breaks or rate changes for any events coming up within two weeks. It’s important for it to be two weeks since it has to account for the akrasia horizon plus the fact that I only do this goal once a week; anything more than two weeks out will still be beyond the akrasia horizon the next time I dial my roads. Since instituting this goal I have had zero episodes of awkward non-goal-dialing. Except for instances where, in my hubris, I deliberately chose not to dial down some goals even though in retrospect I probably should have.
PS: It’s not obvious that would’ve prompted Bee to notice the impending TagTime beemergency since Prof Yorgey’s rule is just about looking at calendared events. But maybe it can be generalized to also review every goal that has less than two weeks of safety buffer.
Either way, @bee and @byorgey are both brilliant and we should all emulate them. Oh hey, should-statement. Ok, dreev.commits.to/make_a_byorgey_style_dial_meta_goal