How do I change my goal?

You might discover that your new goal is too hard to maintain with the rest of your life commitments. Or you might discover that your goal is incredibly easy, and you're getting way more done than you thought you would. (That's the dream!)

Either way, you can edit the goal after it's been created to make it suit you better. All changes made using the commitment dial will take place starting 7 days from when you make them.

You can make the goal harder within the akrasia horizon using the visual graph editor, but you can never make it easier.

Making your rate harder (or easier)

Using the Commitment Dial section of the Commitment tab below the graph on the goal page, you can enter a new rate and click Commit to save changes and commit to the new rate going forward.

Commitment dial screenshot: "Dialing your red line means changing your commitment starting a week from now. This will adjust the final segment of your red line graph, so if you already have graph changes upcoming, you might want to use the more powerful graph editor to make changes to your commitment." Below that, there's a stepper to set the number of items per time period, which you can type a number into.

Any of these changes will kick in after the 7-day akrasia horizon, even if you're making the goal harder. You can see in the graph below how the bright red line kicks up just after the blue dotted line, one week from when the change was made. You can remove safety buffer to bump it up faster, if you're way too far from your bright red line and not feeling the burn.

Example graph image showing where the bright red line starts sloping up faster on a goal that has been made harder, starting seven days from the current date

Setting a particular end-date or end-total

For some goals, you might want to clarify the bounds of your goal, e.g. by setting the goal to end by a particular date. To do that, click the Change goal date and goal total link highlighted in blue in the screenshot below. This will open up an editor where you can set goals that will end at a particular date and/or value.

Commitment dial screenshot: "Dialing your red line means changing your commitment starting a week from now. This will adjust the final segment of your red line graph, so if you already have graph changes upcoming, you might want to use the more powerful graph editor to make changes to your commitment." Below that, there's a stepper to set the number of items per time period, and then highlighted is the link to "Change goal date and goal total"

For example, the image above and the one below are from a goal that's committed to 5 sets of exercises per week until 2023-12-31.

The goal total, in the blue box, is grayed out, which means that you're not choosing that goal total; it's just the goal total that will result from doing 5 exercises per week until December 31, 2023. You can input any two of the three fields; the third will be calculated automatically.

Make sure that the two fields you want to set have a white background (as in the boxes highlighted in red) when you press Update!

Screenshot of the expanded commitment dial, showing that you can set the goal date, the goal total and the goal rate. One of these fields will always be greyed out, but you can click into it to make it an active one.

Important note: depending on your settings, your bright red line might get steeper if you derail. If you want to reach a certain total by a certain date, and then you slip off track and get seven days of respite, the line after the respite will get steeper in order to catch you up.

If that's not what you want, setting your goal by goal date and goal rate may turn out to be a better plan where the goal date is what matters, or goal total and goal rate where the date doesn't matter but the total does.


Keywords: changing what you've committed to, modifying your goal, newbees

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