This is measuring two different things:
- minding the number of steps
- minding the number of ‘adequate’ days
For #1, I think we’re all in violent agreement that beeminding the average is superior to many other methods. It is ridiculously frustrating when your pedometer hit 9900 steps and it’s counted for nothing by our productivity competitors.
For #2, it’s more complicated. Arguably any binary goal is tracking days of effort above a not-aways-well-defined threshold.
I like @dreev’s suggestion of setting an autoratchet threshold to force some effort every N days. But that approach also requires that the daily minimum and the weekly minimum are the same rate. (Not strictly true, but sufficiently so for the purposes of discussion)
Here’s a great example from @aspiers about separating a daily minimum (threshold-driven!) goal from an overall goal. He’ll still need two Beeminder goals to achieve that, but at least now he can automate it using an IFTTT recipe like @tomjen’s…
In short. we agree that if it’s steps (or equivalent) that we’re beeminding, then minding the raw count is the right approach. That’s true regardless of autoratchet or aggregation settings. But sometimes you also want to count the days on which you accomplish ‘enough’ toward your goal, in the same spirit as a must-do or a user-visible improvement…