What if I only want to do my goal on weekdays?

• What if I can't pay for premium to have weekends off?
• I have premium, why is there a warning asking me to change my rate to daily before I can set my weekends off?

Automatically-scheduled weekends off are a feature of the Bee Plus and Beemium subscriptions! If you have that subscription level, check the Stop/Pause tab below the graph to turn on the feature, and we'll schedule your first weekend off for the next Saturday and Sunday coming up. After that, your break will be automatically set 7 days before the weekend.

If you don't have premium, read on! There are ways to work around it, depending on how proactive you're okay with being and what works for your brain.

What if I can't pay for premium to have weekends off?

The premium feature sets your weekends automatically, but you can either build them into your goal through your rate (method #1 below), which does risk data being due on those days, or you can set a break yourself each week (method #2 below), where the only risk is that you'll forget to do it 7 days in advance.

Method #1: In general, Beeminder doesn’t care too much about what specific days you do work on; it only cares that you stay on or ahead of your bright red line, on average. If you fall behind the average pace, you will derail, no matter what day it is. If you're above the bright red line, then you're safe. So you can set a goal of 5/7 per day (i.e. 5/week), stay on track on Monday-Friday, and then take your Saturday and Sunday off with no trouble.

It's important to remember that this can backfire. Let's say you have a goal to wake up at 8am five days a week, which you really only want to do on Monday-Friday — but you don’t succeed on Thursday. You’ll need to do it on Saturday or Sunday, or else you will derail over the weekend. (Which makes sense, of course, given that you didn’t meet your goal to wake up by 8am the 5 days of Monday-Friday: you should derail in that case, it's just delayed.) You can choose to either derail over the weekend, or get up at 8am on the weekend to catch up.

We'd suggest setting some respite for a goal like this, to make sure that if you derail on Friday, you don't have to do it on Saturday/Sunday.

Method #2: If you don't want to subscribe for the automatic breaks, but the above method is a bit too counter-intuitive or you need a surer thing, you can always set your goal to 1/day (or whatever your preferred daily rate might be) and then manually schedule breaks (using Take a Break) every weekend to explicitly get yourself off the hook for those days. You'll need to remember to do that at least 7 days in advance every time, as with all changes that make the goal easier.

You can schedule breaks several weekends ahead, but we wouldn't recommend getting too far ahead, as you'd then need the graph editor to change your rate for weeks where you've already scheduled a weekend: overall rate changes for your goal kick in after any scheduled breaks.

I have premium, why is there a warning asking me to change my rate to daily before I can set my weekends off?

Sounds like this is what you're seeing!

Weekends off would still work for you, in theory: every weekend, we'd schedule the break... but you wouldn't be forced to meet the weekly rate you want to meet. As an example, imagine you want to do 14/week. You'd have to do 2 units each day on Monday through Friday, for a total of 10, and then your Saturday and Sunday would be flat (a rate of 0/day), meaning you don't have to do anything. In the end, you would have only done 10 of the units you were aiming for, and you won't be punished or forced to catch up.

In other words, our weekends off feature doesn't take into account that this is a weekly rate (since those don't really exist on Beeminder). Your rate is 14/7 = 2 for the weekdays, and 0 for the weekend days.

What you need to do in this situation is figure out the daily rate you want: take your weekly rate, and divide it by five (instead of by seven, as you usually would). In this example, that's 2.8/day. You can work it out for yourself, or just use the rate field to work it out as usual:

Change your rate to that number per day in the commitment tab of the goal, submit the changes, and then you can use weekends off without fear!

Keywords: weekends-off, weekday-only goals, get green on Friday