Clearing up some confusion that has come up: (and holy crap, thanks so much for the flood of interest since this hit the frontpage!)
What if you just want a flat yellow brick road to force yourself to do, say, a minimum of 60 minutes of studying per day?
The answer is that that’s not a flat yellow brick road, that’s a yellow brick road that slopes up at the rate of 60 minutes per day.
In other words, you’ll have a graph with total cumulative number of minutes of studying on the y-axis and time on the x-axis.
Also, if you literally want to force yourself to do a minimum of 60 minutes each day, we don’t quite support that.
What you can force yourself to do with Beeminder is maintain an average of X minutes per day. When you do more you end up above the road which will give you a safety buffer. You can then make the road steeper (increase X) to get rid of that safety buffer.
Note that if you only ever do the bare minimum then Beeminder will enforce that 60 minutes every day, because you’ll always be skating the bottom edge and that’s the amount you’ll have to do each day to stay on the road.
Good point! But with that kind of graph we assume (like with weight loss) that the measurements are noisy and we compute the width of the yellow brick road based on the variance in the data. So if you put in huge days occasionally then the road width could get too big and the road would lose its teeth.
But mostly we just haven’t tried doing it that way. If anyone wants to, we’ll pay close attention to it and see if we can make it work.
Clearing up some confusion that has come up: (and holy crap, thanks so much for the flood of interest since this hit the frontpage!)
What if you just want a flat yellow brick road to force yourself to do, say, a minimum of 60 minutes of studying per day?
The answer is that that’s not a flat yellow brick road, that’s a yellow brick road that slopes up at the rate of 60 minutes per day. In other words, you’ll have a graph with total cumulative number of minutes of studying on the y-axis and time on the x-axis.
Also, if you literally want to force yourself to do a minimum of 60 minutes each day, we don’t quite support that. What you can force yourself to do with Beeminder is maintain an average of X minutes per day. When you do more you end up above the road which will give you a safety buffer. You can then make the road steeper (increase X) to get rid of that safety buffer.
Note that if you only ever do the bare minimum then Beeminder will enforce that 60 minutes every day, because you’ll always be skating the bottom edge and that’s the amount you’ll have to do each day to stay on the road.
Can’t you also have a 60 minute study, with no safety buffer, by using the “personal max” option on a flat road?
Certainly seems like that’d work to me.
Good point! But with that kind of graph we assume (like with weight loss) that the measurements are noisy and we compute the width of the yellow brick road based on the variance in the data. So if you put in huge days occasionally then the road width could get too big and the road would lose its teeth.
But mostly we just haven’t tried doing it that way. If anyone wants to, we’ll pay close attention to it and see if we can make it work.