Allow for greater chunkiness of time
Beeminder is great for stuff that needs to happen every day, but for stuff that is more about sporadic large chunks of time it doesn't work so well. For example, if I set a 15 hours a week goal and tend to spread this out with 5 hours 3 days a week, I'll quickly run off Beeminder's smooth daily ramp. It would be nice if Beeminder understood this kind of chunkiness.
We very much disagree about this and hope we can convince you! Beeminder allows brilliantly for chunkiness of time. You just have to pay attention to the number of Safety Buffer days you have left. So if you are doing your chunk of work for the week and want to make sure that you can last 7 days before doing more, just make sure you have 7 days of safety buffer. Let your road be flat for a week initially if you want to make sure you can establish such a safety buffer. (And see the other Feedback item I just responded to about how we won’t be imposing that initial week of flat spot, but you can still choose to have it.)
The beauty of the yellow brick road is that it guarantees that you will maintain the overal average that you want to maintain — like 15 hours a week — while allowing as much flexibility as theoretically possible about when you do it.
In other words, if you go off the yellow brick road, it is necessarily because you have failed to maintain the overall average you said you wanted to maintain. Sure you may be able to bring the average back up in your next chunk of work, but we’re just imposing the constraint that you do it the other way around. Get above your road when you do the chunk of work, then coast for a while till you’re in danger and then do your next chunk. It’s fundamentally the same except we’ve taken away the danger of the slippery slope of getting further and further behind thinking you’ll make it up with a bigger and bigger marathon chunk of work later.
Convincing? It’s a basic tennet of Beeminder that you’ll never lose on a technicality so definitely let us know if you think you have a counterexample!
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Admindreeves (Cofounder, Beeminder) commented
Thanks Joel! I should point out that this uservoice item is now a major motion blog post: http://blog.beeminder.com/chunky/
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Joel Bradshaw commented
I had this same issue, and I think the last bit here is what really resonated with me:
"Get above your road when you do the chunk of work [at the beginning], then coast for a while till you’re in danger and then do your next chunk. It’s fundamentally the same except we’ve taken away the danger of the slippery slope of getting further and further behind thinking you’ll make it up with a bigger and bigger marathon chunk of work later."
The point of not having delayed accountability, or some other solution to this, is to avoid exactly what's happened with me, which is starting a goal and then never doing it. It makes sense to me to wait to start a "chunky" goal until you have some "chunks" to contribute already.