Understanding "Safe Until" date for Do Less Goal

I believe the closest to an answer i’ve found on Forums and Help is: What is "safety buffer" or leeway? - Beeminder Help

However, i’d like to know in more granular detail, why does my Do Less goal with a commitment of 4 times/week, where i currently have a hard cap of +4, show a message of “Safe Until 25 Jan”, or “Safe for 8 days…”? NB: I have PPRs turned off for this Do Less goal.

Some hypotheses:

  • Even though i have PPRs turned off, this estimate uses a reasonable forecast of 1 additional datapoint per day. So the message is that i would derail that day if i were to adopt that cadence of logging datapoints.
  • The same kind of forecast, but based on my current average daily rate for this goal, which doesn’t appear to be something shown in the Statistics Tab (Surprisingly under Graph Stats it simply restates my commitment as “Daily Rate - 1, Weekly Rate - 4, Avg Rate - 4 per week” instead of some kind of calculated cumulative average rate. Also, the Mean for a graph like this doesn’t seem too useful, idk, stats aren’t a real strength of mine)

The goal if you’d like to look specifically at it: weed – liamhession – beeminder

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Thanks so much for flagging this! You’re exactly right that it’s calculating that based on hypothetical PPRs even though you’ve turned them off. This is confusing and arguably even buggy. Our intention is to drop the “safe for __ days” part of the header for do-less goals. If you mouse over the words “safe for” you’ll see a tooltip with your actual hard cap today which is the only thing we expect you to need to know for a do-less goal (and for more detail you can look at the Due By table in the Stats tab).

Is that making sense? Sorry for the confusion here. Definitely agree that the concept of “safe until” is silly for do-less goals!

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That does make sense, good to know what’s actually going on behind the scenes! Thank you for the response

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