So the triangle alcohol goal is generally going pretty well. I’ve discovered an issue in it though and I’m wondering if anyone has any tips for how to redesign it to not have this issue.
Basically the problem is that once I derail there’s nothing stopping me keeping drinking. Previously what’s stopped me has been cocmmon sense and a general desire to drink moderately, but once I’ve made a conscious decision to derail I get in the mindset of “Free day! No rules! I can do whatever I want!” which tends to undermine that.
This is somewhat an artifact of the fact that it’s intended to be OK to derail on this goal occasionally. I’d like to keep that if possible, as the goal is really designed for commonly occurring drinking rather than parties etc. Maybe the solution there though is to go to more parties so that that becomes part of commonly occurring drinking I have to account for and just make it not OK to derail.
So far this has only happened once, but it resulted in me drinking a lot more than I normally would (some of that may have been situational too - people around me were also drinking quite a lot) and it may be that now I’m aware of the issue I’ll just be able to adopt a solution of “don’t do that then”, but the incentive is definitely there and it feels like it will it will always have this effect even if it’s not quite as extreme of one. Any ideas?
Interesting. I thought that Do Less goals immediately derailed if you were above the road by more than your daily rate. Maybe this is a change since last year or maybe I just have bad memory.
In any case, you could fix this by amending your fine print to say that you’re obligated to count above the road datapoints after the first towards your new road after rerail. So if you have 2 drinks above the limit today, then tomorrow morning after rerail you have to edit the date on the 2nd data point from yesterday to make it today. This may derail you again of course.
Deraling when you are above your do less doesn’t make sense for a lot of goals where you can do an anti-action that will let you go back under - e.g net calories eaten may go over your limit several times a day, as you eat but be under the limit by your dead line.
Other things like that are drafts of unpublished blog posts (to force you to publish something) - those obviously go down when you publish one of them.
Ah now I’ve remembered. Your goal will instantly derail without warning after data point entry if it is a do less goal and you were in the red yesterday. Basically, if you’re on your “can only be in the red on alternating days” grace period and you enter a data point that would ruin it, you derail right then and there rather than having until midnight.
I find that this behavior of do-less goals is quite confusing, actually. Sometimes my do-less goal would derail when I was in the red, and sometimes I’d find that I was safe the next day, and I couldn’t quite figure out what the logic behind it was. It seems like it’s okay to be in the red on alternating days, so long as you don’t go so far off the road as to also derail for the next day as well?
My naive assumption would have been that on do-less goals, you’d derail the instant you went off the road. I guess the ability to enter negative datapoints complicates the issue, but still, I’d think that if I’m in the red at midnight, then I would derail. Is there something I’m missing here? Does it have to do with the deadline time - since I’m given my allocation for the next day at midnight, it puts me back on the road the instant before I’d derail?
As I’ve said elsewhere (I forget where), I think the best thing would be if you derailed whenever you have a red data point prior to today. The data you’ve entered today doesn’t count and can’t make you derail. So you can never insta-derail (because data entry errors do happen), but you also can’t cheat on your Do Less goals either. When your “today” rolls over into “yesterday”, you derail if you were in the red.
