Trying a whittle down goal. Set it up to complete reports I’m behind on. I’m behind by 11. So when I set it up in “today’s value” I entered “11”. Underneath that box it says “Your yellow brick road will start (almost) flat. Dial it down when ready with the road dial below your graph!”. I hit “create goal” and I have a straight horizontal line (yellow brick road" going through “11” with a target at the date of the goal. It doesn’t seem to make much sense, so I went to the “dial road” and changed the “goal value” to “0” since that’s where I want to be in on the goal date. Now I have a straight line for a week that drops off sharply to 0 representing the yellow brick road. I would think I’d want a nice smooth line representing steady progress to 0.
The steepness is also a function of what goal date you set. If you set a date that is, say, 11 weeks away you’ll only have to do 1 thing per week. Alternatively you can set the weekly rate and Beeminder will calculate the effective end date for you. I’m referring to the “Dial Road” thingy:
Thanks for the quick reply. Maybe I’m just not giving the graph time to settle in or maybe my goal is too short. I want to finish 11 reports by Dec 22. It appears that I have too much of a leeway before I derail (goal date passes). But if I use retrorachet it sets the goal value to 0. Hmmm.
Oh, if it is really that much of a short-term thing I would email support@beeminder.com. Ideally you would be allowed to edit the road within the Akrasia Horizon to make it harder, but as-is you need to email them to make any edits to the road between now and a week from today.
I suspected that was the case. So I created a “do more” goal and calculated the number of reports I’d have to do to get caught up by the date when I want to get caught up (circled below). Now I am getting the metrics I want (also circled below). Once I’m caught up I can dial back my goal to stay on track. Thanks again for the feedback.
