Viewing entire road when you've set a target date

Akrasia
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I have a goal to finish a work project consisting of a specific number of words by a certain date. I’d like to be able to see the entire projected road, from start to target date. Is that possible?

I’m just very anxious about whether Beeminder is giving me the right numbers all the time, and I’d like visual confirmation that the road as dialed will get me where I need to be. I’m low in confidence on that because:

(1) I recently derailed, but Beeminder didn’t change my road steepness (though the road dial shows me the new daily value I should be targeting), and

(2) When I manually calculate the words I should be doing per day, I come up with a higher number than Beeminder does.

I absolutely cannot afford to miss this deadline, so I need to know that Beeminder is reliably going to get me there. (Yes, I could “do more each day just to be safe” or “change the target date to be early and give me buffer,” but both of those mean compensating for the fact that Beeminder is not working correctly. Which is not good.)

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Answering my own question: yes, you can see as much of the road as you like by setting x-max in the Terrifyingly Advanced settings.

I’m leaving the question here, in case anyone else ever asks it and searches the forum.

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Secondary question: is your rate right?

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The YBR takes me There from Here, so I assume it is, but this was very definitely my question. The difference between what I calculate using the words I still need to do divided by the days left (1681) is only slightly higher than the rate the road dial shows me (1668), but it’d still mean a scramble near the end if Beeminder turned out to be wrong.

I understand that the YBR slopes are so close to one another that they might not be eyeballably different. But what makes me worry is that the Amounts Due By Day graph at the right is still using the old rate. The difference between the old rate (1616) and the new one is significant enough to actually torpedo me if I don’t realize it in time.

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Yes, this will solve your issue if your goal has a fixed end date. There’s currently no solution for goals where the end date is implied, because the {x,y}-{max,min} settings only take absolute dates.

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Beeminder lets you set the centerline of the road but only derails you on the (variable width) lower ‘critical’ edge. The only way to be sure is to set a fixed lanewidth (I use 0*) and calculate the critical edge value yourself.

(This makes me very sad.)

* It also means you don’t get blue or yellow days :frowning:

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Me too and I promise it will get fixed and I’m sorry we’re slow. It’s a hairy change that touches so much code. But it’s going to feel amazing to change it to the much more elegant version you’ve articulated. Thanks for holding our feet to the fire!

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