New Premium Feature: Weekends Off
Beeple of the world want to take their weekends off, and for a long time the best answer we’ve had is “well, if you just make sure to get green by Friday night, then you can safely take Saturday and Sunday off”, which is highly unsatisfying to the truly akratic. Because if I had the discipline to “just get green by Friday” how badly would I really need Beeminder’s nudge in the first place? And so for years I’ve been having good intentions to get enough work done to take the weekend off, and then wound up with at least a few hours of work each day of my so-called rest time.
“With a Plan Bee or higher subscription you can tick a checkbox in your goal’s settings and we’ll schedule next week’s break for you every Friday.”
Until about half a year ago when I started scheduling breaks for myself every Friday. Which has been working pretty great, but I’d still forget sometimes, and then I wouldn’t have my weekend and I’d feel pretty bent out of shape. So I finally started a Beeminder goal that’s due every Friday that reminds me to schedule breaks. Now that I have an unforgettable reminder, I’ve had nice relaxed weekends most weeks, and it’s been pretty good for my mental health, I think.
Anyhow, so now we’re automating this. With a Plan Bee or higher subscription you can tick a checkbox in your goal’s settings and we’ll schedule next week’s break for you every Friday.
Do More
For your Do More goals we’ll put in a flat spot over Saturday and Sunday. You may find it helpful to switch your goal over to daily rate units if you’re using this feature. A goal set to 40hrs/week is equivalent to only 5.7 hours per day, so if you have your goal set to 40 hours/week, with weekends scheduled in this way, you only have to complete 28.5 hours each week to stay on track.
Do Less
For your Do Less goals we also ask for the amount of buffer you want on the weekend, and then we schedule a jump on Saturday to give you that much extra buffer. The buffer is the total amount for the weekend, not in terms of your rate units. We also skip pessimistic presumptive reports for the weekend. We do it like this for Do Less because, imagine you’re tracking your passive entertainment / TV watching time. You may want to watch no TV during the work week, but then on the weekend, you want to watch as much TV as you please. This allows you to do that.
Additional Caveats
We also stop autoratcheting (another premium feature) for the weekend, so that you don’t allow yourself a buffer and then scooch it away. However, because of the way that Do More ratcheting works, where it winds up shifting the dates of future road segments, ratcheting is not recommended for Do More goals with weekends scheduled.
Now, this method of scheduling the breaks ahead of time is not foolproof, because you could go over your allowed weekend buffer with a Do Less, or you could forget and ratchet a Do More goal and wind up shifting the weekend for some reason, so we also have a failsafe that (for now) calls in us humans to the rescue if you manage to derail a goal on a Saturday or Sunday while weekends-off is checked. In short, we’re guaranteeing that you won’t!