Deadline snoozing in Beeminder refers to scooching your deadline later as it’s bearing down. Traditionally we’ve allowed any deadline changes until six hours before the deadline. But we’ve always hated that. It’s arbitrary and hard to remember. We have a whole essay railing against such things — the Anti-Magic Principle, we call it.
Ok, now for a quick economics digression. Some of you may know Gresham’s Law. It’s generally stated as “bad money drives out good” but the idea generalizes. Another famous bit of economics theory is the “Market for Lemons”. Suppose people sell their cars on eBay or wherever, and some cars are so-called lemons that are constantly breaking down and other cars are the opposite, peaches. Key is that you can’t tell a lemon from a peach till after you’ve bought it and driven it for a while. So if you’re car shopping, you’d gladly pay more for a peach than a lemon but, since you can’t be sure you’re not buying a lemon, you won’t pay peach prices. That means if you’re selling a car, and you know your car is a peach, you can’t get a fair price for it in that market. You can tell buyers your car is a peach, but that’s cheap talk [1] and they won’t believe you. So, as economists love to say, solve for the equilibrium. Everyone selling a peach flees that market and everyone selling lemons flocks to it. The bad drives out the good.
By rough analogy to all that, we’re coining Gresham’s Law of Beeminder Deadlines: Akratic deadlines drive out intentional ones. Presuming you’re like us, when something comes up and you snooze your deadline, it’s like a retrogressive ratchet. You never put the deadline back where it should be because it’s too onerous to do that within your akrasia horizon. You’d have to muster the discipline to make the deadline earlier again when that deadline is already bearing down on you.
So, in light of Gresham’s Law of Beeminder Deadlines, we’d like to simply kill deadline snoozing. Let us save you from yourselves — backing yourselves into corners where all your deadlines end up at 6am. Paternalism! We see this as an instance of a more general rule of thumb that we’ve called “the #1 rule of Beeminder”: things that make staying on the good side of your bright red line easier make reaching your underlying goal harder.
So that’s what’s currently deployed, as of today. If a goal is in the red, the deadline is just uneditable.
And since this is a violation of the Pareto Dominance Principle — meaning there exist users for whom this may make Beeminder slightly worse — we’re following our self-imposed rule that we have to write a blog post justifying ourselves. So, um, are you convinced?
“Noooooo, I am unmoved, you can take deadline snoozing from my cold, dead hands”
Geez, ok, hypothetical user — if you exist, which we’re not totally sure of. We have ideas for potentially getting the best of all worlds if there’s demand for it. (If this is you, please jump into the discussion in the forum.)
In fact, for a few days until today we tried out an honor system version if you tried to deadline-snooze:
Warning! You’re about to make your deadline later on a beemergency day. This can dampen Beeminder’s effectiveness. Do you promise that either (a) you really endorse this later deadline as a permanent change or (b) you have a good reason for changing it temporarily and have set yourself a calendar reminder to put this deadline back?
(If you just really need a break today, we humbly suggest treating yourself to the derailment)
And then you could click Cancel or “I Promise”.
Early feedback was that it was just too easy to click “I Promise” on autopilot. So we started layering on the duct tape. We floated the idea of a popup like the Uncle button has, where you’d have to type out a phrase to prove you understand the corner you may be backing yourself into.
Or we could make you prove you really mean it by charging a fee to snooze your deadline, if that wouldn’t seem to money-grubbing.
The real best of all worlds
But speaking of money-grubbing, the thing we’d most like to convince you of is that, as we’ve been saying for a while, Derailing It Is Nailing It. (See also the whole “derailing is good-actually” series in the sidebar of Maximal Motivation At Minimal Cost.)
Consider what it means to be willing to pay the tax of snoozing your deadline. Today you’re busy or stressed and it’s hard to meet Beeminder’s demands. Snoozing it has a short-term payoff. But, as we argued above, it’s hard to unsnooze a snoozed deadline. And you presumably chose that deadline for a reason. So the tax you’re paying is mustering the discipline to unsnooze the deadline in the future or else have a permanently less effective Beeminder.
The point is, snoozing a Beeminder deadline is paying a real, if non-monetary, tax. We humbly suggest that you could pay the pledge as that tax. In other words, accept the derailment and enjoy the reprieve on today’s deadline, with no further tax imposed on your future self.
We know it’s a little suspect coming from us, but we’re sincere in our belief that it’s the right attitude for optimal beeminding. The “must do whatever it takes to not derail” attitude is not necessarily all bad but it should have its limits. Deadline snoozing should mostly be viewed as outside those limits since, in practice, it seems to amount to digging oneself in a hole.
Again, if you have strong opinions, especially if you’re sad to be losing the ability to change a goal’s deadline when it’s in the red, do head to the forum thread and chime in.
Footnotes
[1] Cheap talk is the opposite of a costly signal. Also, “cheap talk” might be another case of the holy grail of jargon: a technical concept that’s fully (or close enough to fully) captured in a sufficiently short plain English phrase. See Against Pseudovernacular Jargon where we argue, among other things, that Beeminder’s “bright red line” shares this honor.