Not sure if I’m just being dumb here, but I’m wondering with all the new changes around how BM displays our goals in the website, how does the “weekends off” feature work?
Previously, this was all about the yellow brick road. There were some amendments to how things worked such that I could have a goal that was 5 days out, but it’d still be displayed as “blue” (indicating that I needed to work on it).
Currently blue seems to really just mean “two days out” across the board, rather than “today is the day you should work on this goal in order to stay in the green as per your goals / setup”.
So I guess I’m wondering how can I make BM work how I want it to? I don’t want to know that goals are 2 days away from breaking. I want to know whether I should work on this goal today or not (without having to remember which ones were weekend-free or not). I can’t seem to figure out how to do this, so now my weekends are often filled with working on things that I’d set as “weekends off” simply because of this behaviour change.
I’m really confused by this post. Why are your weekends filled with working on things that say weekends off? Are the goals saying they will derail on the weekends when they won’t?
The idea is that I don’t want to get to Monday and have to dig myself out with only 24 hours till a goal derails. I want to preserve all goals with 3 days ‘breathing room’ at all times. So if something is weekends off, then currently it’ll give me the weekend off, but if I don’t work on it all weekend I’ll get to monday and I’ll have to do 3 days worth of work to get back to my 3-day buffer status.
In the past, how it would work would be this way: I’d look at my BM goals page and at a glance I’d see which goals were NOT green (i.e. blue or orange or red). Mostly it’d just be blue coloured graphs since I like to keep on top of things. This would include some that were due in two days (let’s say these didn’t have any weekends-off policies enabled) and some that were due in 5 days (that DID have weekends-off policies enabled). So I could be on Friday and I’d know at a single visual glance which goals I need to work on in order not to have to work on anything over the weekend (if I’d enabled weekends off).
How it works now is that the blue-for-weekends-off-goals has been disabled. You can’t get a blue-coloured goal on your goal page unless it is under 3 days for it to be due. So I have to keep a list of which goals are weekends-off, and work on them on Thursday and Friday EVEN THOUGH they are shown as green on my screen.
Does that make sense? I was told in some email exchanges with someone on the support team (I forget exactly who) that this was part of a new policy change around the yellow brick road.
because I don’t want to work on certain goals on the weekends. that means that on thursdays and fridays, the ones with weekends-off will have exaggerated days-till-due because of the amendment to the road that is inserted on account of the weekends-off policy.
I guess another way of putting it is that the number of days till it’s due is not always going to be a useful indicator since for non-weekend-off goals 2 days is the indicator that I must work on it, but if it’s a weekend-off goal then 4 days (+23:59 etc) is going to be when I need to work on it. so it’ll be different depending on what weekends-off is set to. And absent the old behaviour of colouring things blue, I have no way to see and remember all these details at a glance without going in and checking whether a particular goal has a weekends-off policy enabled or not. (I have many goals).
No, @grayson - it’s the opposite of that. I wanted colors to go by numbers of days instead of road position, but @strickvl has a really interesting counterexample here where road position is what matters. They lead to different outcomes with weekends off.
@strickvl, unless I’m missing something, basically right now I think beeminder is no longer set up to easily accommodate this use case.
You could always go with ugly hacks like: rename the weekends-off goals from, say, “pushups” to “WO-pushups” or something like that, or keep widgets on a different part of the android screen to help you remember which are weekends off, or use the “tags” feature.
But I think trying to keep a goal at a constant number of days of buffer when the road slope is varying (as it does with weekends off) is going to be tricky.
There’s something seemingly inconsistent here - or maybe redundant - why do you want both weekends off and a 3-day buffer for the same goal? What if you just picked one of those? Either make the goal weekends off and not try to preserve the buffer, or try to keep a 3-day buffer and put weekends back on?
Wanting both of those things - weekends off and a 3-day buffer - makes for a really interesting use case - I’d like to hear what @dreev@bee@adamwolf@drtall think about it.
Aha, gotcha. But wouldn’t @strickvl’s problem be solved by being able to set weekend-off goals so that blue = 4 days instead of the default blue = 2 days?
I understand that this isn’t identical to the old behavior; a weekend-off goal that’s blue on Monday wouldn’t have the same needs-to-be-worked-on factor that a regular goal has on a Monday. But I think it solves the problem @strickvl is actually having:
I’ve only scan-read this, sorry, but: surely what’s needed here is for “days until due” to be implemented as “working days until due”? Or am I missing something?
Example:
Thursday:
situation: goal will derail on Friday
display: “due in 1 days”
Friday:
situation: goal will derail on Monday
display: “due in 1 days”
The problem is it depends what context you’re talking about. If you are saying “will derail in N days” you might be asking about calendar days, and I think that is what’s natural to display on the dashboard. But if you’re talking about retroratchet you almost certainly always mean “work days”.
Similarly for colors, two goals may both be due on the Wednesday which is 4 days from now, but one of them is red and one of them is green based on which days between now and Wednesday are available for the goal.
of course it is. Road position tells you something about how far from the bright line of derailment you currently are. Depending on how your road is shaped, that could be any number of days of ‘safety’.
Weekends off is (as implemented) an imperfect proxy for wanting to only-count-weekdays. True breaks might help.
If I understood them, some other people on this thread (like me) would prefer to see work days there because we try to keep that number of days at 7 or above (or at 3 or above, or whatever).
I can imagine lots of minor variants that say it in different ways that might keep more people happy while still allowing people to keep their workdays-until-derail level stable:
Example #1:
Thursday:
situation: goal will derail on Friday
display: “due in 1 work day”
Friday:
situation: goal will derail on Monday
display: “due in 1 work day”
Example #2:
Thursday:
situation: goal will derail on Friday
display: “due in 1 day”
Friday:
situation: goal will derail on Monday
display: “due in 1 work day”
Example #3:
Thursday:
situation: goal will derail on Friday
display: “due in 1 day”
Friday:
situation: goal will derail on Monday
display: “due in 1 work day (3 calendar days)”
Example #4:
Thursday:
situation: goal will derail on Friday
display: “due in 1 work day (1 calendar day)”
Friday:
situation: goal will derail on Monday
display: “due in 1 work day (3 calendar days)”
I would consider that display horribly broken. Without knowing if the goal was weekends off, it would be very confusing to be told 1 day and not know if it was really 1 day or not.
I want to know the total calendar days till due, not working days.
Besides, this doesn’t generalize. Someone could set up their road so it has a 0 slope on Tues, Thurs, and Sunday - there’s a tool somewhere that lets you do that.
@drtall, what @strickvl is saying (as I understand it) is that this is no longer true - they are now both showing up as green due to the YBHP changes.
Oh interesting…I thought the colors were supposed to indicate urgency. Like orange means “this is your last chance to act before you have an eep day”. In which case a goal that has 0 working days before the deadline should be orange, not some other color based on how many calendar days are between now and the deadline. Or so I thought.
