RetroRatchet!
Building up a safety buffer can be great but sometimes you have too much safety buffer and your yellow brick road becomes pretty toothless for a while. Especially if you had the steepness set too conservatively at first.
So let's have a feature where, when a flash of willpower strikes, you can make your road harder immediately and wipe out the safety buffer. (It's still important to have the one-week delay on making the road easier, for the reasons discussed at http://blog.beeminder.com/dial )
One way to do this is a RetroRatchet button that makes the yellow brick road retroactively steepen so that your current datapoint is exactly on the road.
RetroRatchet is here! We’re now working on a version where you can choose how much to ratchet. This version is fully hardcore, making the road leap to wherever your datapoint is today.
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Admindreeves (Cofounder, Beeminder) commented
I'm really liking Yoni's idea of, at least as a first step, just specifying a cap on your safety buffer and having the road jump up to prevent it exceeding that cap. That still suffers from the problem that Rodrigo points out, that reducing the safety buffer should be associated with an increase in the rate, but maybe it's a good start.
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Yoni Fogel commented
I agree; The feature I would want is 'remove X days' of safety buffer, or equivalently, reduce my safety buffer to X days (but keep the slope).
Another similar feature request would be a setting in a goal to automatically prevent do this.. e.g. limit safety buffer to X days (to prevent you from pushing hard one week, then getting into a 3 week habit of slacking off)
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Rodrigo Belo commented
I think being able to reduce the safety buffer *right now* might allow/encourage a less than desirable way of using Beeminder. Here's an extreme example: I set my workout rate to zero, and from time to time I reduce my safety buffer. I think this defeats the purpose of following a road...
I think the "reduce safety buffer" feature should be associated with an adjustment in the rate that somehow prevents the creation of a similar buffer in the future... What about an "adjust" button that reduces the safety buffer to X days and at the same time sets the rate to the 'actual average rate' of the last Y weeks?
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jmccoh commented
After careful consideration and reading the comments, I think (for my own selfish interests) the button needs to give me x safe days right now - not necessarily change the steepness, but move the YBR up or down the Y axis to accommodate and remove the accumulated safety buffer. You have already provide flexibility to change the steepness with the "makeitso" button.
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julian commented
I like the idea of not modifying the past but making an immediate jump instead. I also wouldn't want to give up my safety buffer in full (and I bet I am not the only one). I currently have 20+ days for one goal and would like to reduce it to 5 or so but not to 0 -- a simple a user-defined parameter would solve this. Lastly, I think it's fine to steepen the road automatically when giving up safety buffer; I'd keep things simple by making the change effective a week from today, so that the user can undo/modify the new rate as needed using the existing functionality.
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Admindreeves (Cofounder, Beeminder) commented
@kg, that's an excellent point. Two excellent points actually (going overboard on nixing the safety buffer, and the historical fidelity issue).
Perhaps we should drop the "retro" part of this and just focus on the "make it harder NOW" part. Then you could even effectively have the spirit of the retroratchet where the road jumps up to where you currently are, but no actual retroactive changes.
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chris commented
I had this same thought and definitely think it would be a good feature. But I have a specific suggestion about how to implement it (or at least for a version of it): I'd like to be able to "give up the safety buffer" without changing the steepness of the road. If you are way above your road, maybe that means it's working, and why mess with something that's working --- you just want to recreate the situation you were in toward the beginning --- same road steepness, just closer to it. So I guess what I'm suggesting is just a "give up buffer" button where you get to chose the amount to give up, and there is just an immediate upward (say) cliff in your road when you do this, but the road continues at the same rate (unless you change it per the usual mechanisms).
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kg commented
My only concern with the retroratchet button as described is that it would then seem to put you on an immediately much steeper rate for the future, when you may just have wanted to get rid of safety buffer you built up without changing your current rate. Also, it changes what your rate was in the past which seems undesirable from a fidelity-to-what-actually-happened standpoint.
My recommendation would be to have "make it easier-one week delay" and "make it harder-now" buttons as melzafish recommends (it might be nice to also have a "make it harder-one week delay" button as a way to start mentally preparing for a ramp up in the future, but this is not so important if you don't want to clutter the interface too much). Then, in addition to those two (or three) buttons, I would have a "reduce safety buffer to [blank] days" setting. -
jmccoh commented
Definitely agree that you should be able to make "harder" instantly but yes a delay when someone is wussin' out or needs to make it easier for legitimate reasons. This would be a good addition.
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I believe this is needed for sure. It's encouraged to start off slow or even flat to make sure you're ready to commit and to see how it feels, so this is an inevitable problem. To get excited about increasing the rate only to know you don't really had to do it for a while defeats the motivation factor of beeminder. To over-increase the rate just to get rid of the safety buffer quicker is one more thing to remember to do later (to adjust to what you really want it to be). Also, you want your graph to look nice and retro-ratchet would accomplish that too. I think any time you make it harder, it should happen immediately. I think the user interface can be kept pretty simple as well: "make it easier-one week delay", "make it harder-now", "retro-ratchet - make my rate exactly I've been doing"