Allow "do-more" goals that have an increasing weekly target over time to reach a goal weekly target
The easiest use case would be for ramping running mileage whereas maybe I can run 6 miles per week now but want to be able to run 24 miles per week. I'd like to be able to say that I want to run 16 miles per week in 16 weeks and that my weekly mileage will ramp accordingly over the next 20 weeks. Bonus if it'd let me ramp by 10% each week (so it's not a linear increase), i.e. 6 miles week 1, 6.6 miles week 2, 7.26 miles week 3, 14.14 miles week 10, etc.
Could call it a "ramping" goal?
Is this already possible with custom goals?
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Admindreeves (Cofounder, Beeminder) commented
Great question, and this is actually a common point of confusion with so-called exponential roads (which are indeed available for custom goals, which is one of the Bee Lite premium perks). Occasionally someone tries to set up a yellow brick road where the steepness automatically increases by, say, 10% each week.
Unfortunately, exponential roads can't be used that way. They can be used for weight loss, for example, when you want the daily or weekly decrease to be a function of your current weight (we recommend a max loss rate of 1% of your weight per week). But we don't have a way to make the rate depend on what the previous *rate* was. I think the confusion here stems from the fact that Beeminder is plotting the cumulative total on the y-axis. Having the rate depend on that cumulative total doesn't make sense.
What we recommend is that you just manually nudge the rate every week with the road dial. We think you'll find that's not as onerous as it sounds and that you'll want to reassess the steepness of your road weekly anyway.
Again, you don't actually want exponential goals unless the rate depends on the current value being plotted on the y-axis. Which doesn't make sense when the cumulative total is what's being plotted.
Something like "losing .3% of your bodyweight per week" (much more realistic than the ultra hardcore 1%/week, btw) is where it does make sense. Or like our meta graphs where we want to grow at some percentage per week.