"Any Time" frequency for habits

[janssenvdh]

I could use an "any time" frequency option without being limited to once per day. For example, I'd like to reward my kids every time they do as they're told without complaining or procrastinating.

It would work similarly to the infinite setting on rewards in the Redeemable field.

Ideas for how to write it in the "When" field include:

• any time
• unlimited
• infinite
• always
• every minute or second (possible workarounds, but not currently supported)

[dohsimpson]

My thoughts:

I think the intention here is to have a reward mechanism to reward coins to them for doing something good. Thinking about this, I feel that it doesn't fit into the habits (e.g. not procrastinating is not a habit, at least in the sense of any time habit).

There are other reason that it might be complicated to incorporate this into the habit system:

• right now, you cannot complete habit on other people's behalf, if you complete a habit in your account, the rewards go to your account, even if it's a shared habit
• you cannot prevent them from abusing the any time habit if this habit is in their account, as they can just click it themselves and get rewards

I'm open to a redesign of the habit system if I can find a better design. Or alternatively, I wonder if we can have a reward system that allows these kind of flexibility, e.g. in the reward view, you can have items such as reward Jimmy 30 coins for doing the chore.

However, the reward system would be kind of similar to the coin system, which allows manually adding coins and adding notes to the transactions.

[dohsimpson]

Another idea if we are dealing with rewards:

if we change the wishlist tab to be called reward. And we can have the concept of reward alongside wishlist. Reward simply add coins when wishlist deduct coins.

[janssenvdh]

I agree that this could be accomplished by manually adding coins and adding notes, but that's a lot of steps for what could be a frequent occurrence. Another use case is to give my kids a single coin every time they say "thank you" without being prompted. I think good manners like this is certainly a habit, and it should happen many times per day.

An alternative solution is to allow divisible coin rewards. For example, a daily habit might be set to be completed 10 times in a day (or more, but 10 is the current limit), and have a reward of 10 coins. If at the end of the day, the habit has been completed 5 times, the user would be rewarded 5 coins. There would need to be some logic to avoid fractional coins, however, or the reward could be set on a per-completion basis. A toggle on the habit editor could switch between divisible and non-divisible habit rewards.

Some of this idea may be dependent on the admin oversight feature discussed in #157 so that an admin can mark habits completed for other users. This could help avoid abuse. Or perhaps an approval process could be implemented, where children mark habits/tasks as completed, but they do not get their coins until an admin accepts it. My children are small and wouldn't use this, but there are many families who might.

If you were to implement a new method of adding coins (i.e. rewards), it would make more sense to add it to the same tab as habits and tasks, rather than creating a separate rewards tab. Even then, I think it would be more confusing for the user than simply making it an option within the existing habit structure.