fixing my accidentally strict mail rules… or not
I recently made some changes to Ywar, my personal goal tracker, and I couldn’t be happier! Mostly.
Ywar is configured with a list of “checks.” Each check looks up some datum, compares it to previous measurements, decides whether the goal state was met, and saves the current measurement. The checks used to run once a day, at 23:00. This meant that, for the most part, the feedback I got was the next morning in my daily agenda mail. I could hit refresh at 23:05, if I wanted, and if I was awake. If I did something at 8:00, I’d just have to remember. For the most part, this wasn’t a big problem, but I wanted to be able to run things more often.
Last week, when I was working on my Goodreads/Ywar
integration, I also made the
changes needed to run ywar update more often. There were two main changes:
every measurement now carries a log of whether it resulted in goal completion,
and checks don’t get the last measured value, but the “last state,” which
contains both the last value measured and the value measured at the last
completion.
While I was at it, I added Pushover notifications. Now, when I get up in the morning, I step on my scale. A few minutes later, my phone bleeps, telling me, “Good job! You stepped on the scale!” Over breakfast, I might read an article I’ve saved to Instapaper. While I was the dishes, or maybe while I read a second article, my iPad bleeps. “Good job! You read something from Instapaper!”
This is surprisingly motivating. I’m completing goals much more often than I used to, now. (The Goodreads integration has also been really motivating.)
This change also inadvertantly introduced a pretty significant change in my email rules. Most of them follow the same pattern, which is something like this:
- at least once every five days, have less unread mail than the previous day
Some of them say “flagged” instead of “unread,” or limit their checks to specific folders, but the pattern is pretty much always like the one above. When I started passing each check both the “last measured” and “last completion” values, I had to decide which they’d use for computing whether the goal was completed. In every case, I chose “last completion.” That means that the difference checked is always between the now and the last time we met our goal. This has a massive impact here.
It used to be that all I had to do to keep my “keep reading email” goal alive was to reduce my unread mail count from the previous date. Imagine the following set of end-of-day unread message counts:
- Sunday: 50
- Monday: 100
- Tuesday: 70
- Wednesday: 100
- Thursday: 75
- Friday: 80
- Saturday: 70
Under the old rules, I would get three completions in that period. On each of Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, the count of unread messages goes down from the previous day.
Under the new rules, I would get only one completion: Tuesday. After that, the only way, ever, to get another completion is to get down to below 70 unread messages. Maybe in a few days, I get to 60, and now that’s my target. This gets pretty unforgiving pretty fast! My current low water mark for unread mail is 28, and I get an averge of 126 new messages each day. These goals actually have a minimum threshold, so that anything under the threshold counts, even if last time I was further below it. Right now, it’s set at 10 for my unread mail goal.
It would be pretty easy to fix this to work like it used to work. I’d get the latest measurement made yesterday and compare to that. I’m just not sure that I should restore that behavior. The old behavior made it very easy to read the easy mail and ignore the stuff that really needed my time. I could let some mail pile up on Wednesday, read the light stuff on Thursday, and I’d still get my point. I kept thinking that I needed something “more forgiving,” but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t even think it makes sense. What would “more forgiving” mean? I’m not sure.
One thing to consider is that if I can never keep a streak alive, I won’t bother trying. It can’t be too difficult. It has to seem possible, and to be possible, without being a huge chore. It just shouldn’t be so easy that no progress is really being made.
Also, I need to make sure that once I’ve broken my streak, any progress starts me up again. If I lose my streak and end up with 2000 messages, having to get back to 25 is going to be a nightmare. My original design was written with this in mind: any progress was progress enough. The new behavior ratchets the absolute maximum down, so that once I’ve gotten rid of most of those 2000 messages, I can’t let them pile back up by ignoring 5 one day, 5 the next, and then reading six the third. Maybe the real solution will be to keep exactly the behavior I have, but to fiddle with the minimum threshold.
The other thing I want to think about, eventually, is message age. I don’t want to ding myself for mail received “just now.” If a message hasn’t been read for a week, I should really read it immediately. If it’s just come in this afternoon, though, it should basically be ignored in my counts. For now, though, I think I can ignore that. After all, my goal here is to read email, not to spend my email reading time on writing tools to remind me of that goal!