Weekend Only Goals

[zedmango]

Thanks for the detailed clarification! Your beelint program looks awesome by the way.

If I understand it correctly, if your goal is due in 4 days but today is the only day of the week you’ve marked as acceptable, the beelint goal eeps with a comment telling you which goal you need to work on - is that right?

That’s definitely a valid approach, but I’d rather have the actual goal that needs attention eep, at the price of either suffering non-legit derailments or entering a 1 on weekdays representing “no need to do anything today.”

Seems like the ultimate ideal is to auto-modify the road, right?

Earlier I said

@zedmango

Another possibility is to allow for uploading a list of numbers used to shape your future road - that way you could script something that would create a table to auto-modify your road for weekend-only the way @apolyton does manually.

Seems silly, but I didn’t realize this could be done with the API! Wow the API is really powerful. Whatever happened to beevacay? You said

@drtall

road editing is not for the faint of heart.

So you said

@drtall

the fundamental things that I want from Beeminder is a guarantee that “When you set your Road Dials, you’ll be forced to do those things at those rates” and “If you have no eep-ing goals, you don’t need to do anything today.”.

Agree very much on the second - the eep is a signal to do something and otherwise I won’t do anything.

As far as the first, it seems like you think of goals as being fundamentally only of the form “do X at rate Y” whereas I see a goal as a commitment contract that could potentially be much more complex.

Accordingly, I see non-legit derailments as part of the process - the world is complicated enough that there’s just no way all derailments are gonna be legit, and that’s why beeminder includes the human element. Otherwise we wouldn’t need to pay them, just write a script that transfers money from your account into a retirement account you never see or something.

So I want beeminder to enforce the commitment contract, not just the rate. My vision of beeminder is that you can put in a complex commitment contract and it will be enforced by the whole system, which includes humans checking if the derailment was legit.

@drtall

There’s also failures of the “bright line” principle, for example What do the colors actually mean? .

I believe this bug was fixed a while back, wasn’t it? The colors now seem to correspond to number of days.

@drtall

Whenever you derail for a non-legit reason or fail to derail when you should, Beeminder has failed as a platform. I say this because you’re simultaneously not doing The Things you want to do and you’re also not being stung.

So as I indicated above, I don’t see non-legit derails as failure, because “doing the Thing you want to do” is more complex than just the rate and needs to be enforced by humans checking if the derailment was legit.

@drtall

a goal which can only be performed on specific days of the week is prone to non-legit derails. If you can only do it on Saturdays and you derail on a Saturday, that’s a sting and you deserve it. But if it derails on a Tuesday, it’s not legit. Sure you don’t lose money for the Tuesday derail, but you’re also not accomplishing the goal you set out to do.

But as I said earlier, you are accomplishing the goal you set out to do, because what you set out to do was to do it on weekends. So Beeminder is forcing you to do what you set out to do, it just also includes some non-legit derails that you have to correct after the fact (and this can be automated as well)!

@drtall

Suggestions of the form “You should look ahead in your calendar” miss the fact that the entire point of Beeminder is that it tells you what you need to do today. So if Beeminder can’t correctly determine that you need to do The Things today, then Beeminder is less useful than it could be.

To clarify, if it tells you that you need to work on the goal today, but doesn’t tell you that you need to work on it until it says “6 days,” how’s that? Because my weekly suggestion does tell you that you need to do it on the correct day, but requires you to know how long to work on it.