{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp05_complete_proposal_portfolio20_20260803","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__psychology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"psychology_active_goal_sunset_ledger_v0","proposal_index":2,"version":0,"title":"Active-Goal Sunset Ledger for Accumulated Behavior-Change Commitments","problem":"People using a behavior-change program can accumulate goals, habits, reminders, implementation intentions, and coping plans faster than they retire them. Commitments created under earlier priorities or circumstances may remain active by default even after enactment stops, their prerequisites disappear, or newer commitments supersede them. The resulting stack can present too many simultaneous cues, conceal conflicts among commitments, and make lapse reports difficult to interpret. Simply deleting old commitments would erase progress history, abandoned-strategy evidence, and plans that may be needed again after relapse or a context change.","actors":["Participant pursuing behavior change","Behavior-change coach or psychologist, when one is involved","Program operator responsible for configuring the goal workspace","Authorized safety reviewer for commitments linked to a clinical or crisis plan"],"observable_state":"A participant's workspace contains multiple concurrently active commitments whose creation date, last enactment, last explicit endorsement, prerequisites, successor relationships, and current relevance are not visible. Observable indicators include active commitment count, duplicate or conflicting cue-response plans, commitments repeatedly dismissed without enactment, plans referring to contexts that no longer occur, new plans added without retiring predecessors, and disagreement between the participant and coach about which commitments are currently operative.","consequence":"Obsolete and competing commitments can continue consuming reminder slots and participant attention, obscure the small set the participant presently intends to enact, and make nonperformance look like undifferentiated failure. Aggressive cleanup can instead destroy evidence about which strategies were tried, why they stopped, and what might be restored if circumstances recur.","affected_objective":"Keep the participant's active behavior-change portfolio small enough to interpret and enact while preserving recoverable history, prerequisite relationships, and designated safety-related exceptions.","intervention":"Create an independently adoptable Active-Goal Sunset Ledger that governs the lifecycle of behavior-change commitments rather than merely listing tasks. The participant chooses a configurable active-slot budget. Every newly admitted commitment receives an identity, creation date, behavioral cue and response, prerequisites, last enactment, last endorsement, review lease, and lifecycle state: active, review-due, paused, superseded, quarantined, or archived. When the active tier is full, the ledger proposes the least recently enacted and endorsed unpinned commitment for demotion to a paused tier; it never destroys it. Lease expiry also triggers review rather than automatic failure or deletion. The participant may renew, revise, supersede, pause, archive, or restore a commitment after checking whether other active plans depend on it. Safety-linked plans are pinned and require authorized review. Retired commitments retain a disposition marker and remain recoverable during a quarantine window and from the archive thereafter.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Sequentially accumulated layers","domain_realization":"Goals, habits, reminders, coping plans, and cue-response intentions are deposited across successive behavior-change attempts."},{"archetype_element":"Changing active usefulness","domain_realization":"A commitment's usefulness changes when priorities, environments, abilities, prerequisites, or strategies change, or when the participant no longer endorses it."},{"archetype_element":"Unbounded active stack","domain_realization":"Old commitments remain eligible to generate reminders and appear current while new commitments are continually added."},{"archetype_element":"Age, access, and validation index","domain_realization":"Each commitment records age, recent enactment, explicit endorsement, dismissals, contextual validity, and dependency status."},{"archetype_element":"Decay and expiration triggers","domain_realization":"Declining enactment or endorsement affects review rank, while expiration of a preassigned lease moves a commitment to review-due without treating age as proof of worthlessness."},{"archetype_element":"Bounded hot tier","domain_realization":"A participant-selected slot budget limits how many commitments can simultaneously occupy the active cueing tier."},{"archetype_element":"Dependency and preservation exceptions","domain_realization":"Prerequisite relationships block unsafe retirement, while participant-pinned and safety-linked plans override ordinary demotion rules."},{"archetype_element":"Differentiated disposition and recovery","domain_realization":"Commitments can be renewed, revised, paused, superseded, quarantined, archived, or restored instead of being reduced to active versus deleted."},{"archetype_element":"Persistent deletion evidence","domain_realization":"A marker records that a commitment existed, why it left active use, and whether another commitment replaced it."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"cache_eviction_rule","role":"When the participant's active-slot budget is full, ranks unpinned commitments using enactment and endorsement recency and proposes one for demotion to the paused tier so a newly chosen commitment can enter.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a capacity-triggered demotion rule, the active set can continue expanding even if review leases exist, preserving the attentional pileup the intervention is meant to govern."},{"mechanism_slug":"age_weighted_value_score","role":"Combines current endorsement, recent enactment, contextual fit, prerequisite role, and recovery value with an age-related decay term to rank commitments for review; the score cannot itself change a lifecycle state.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a comparable ranking input, review would revert to inspecting every accumulated commitment or selecting only the oldest, regardless of present value or dependency."},{"mechanism_slug":"time_to_live_ttl_policy","role":"Assigns each commitment a review lease at creation; expiration makes continued active status an explicit renewal decision rather than the default.","counterfactual_removal":"Without precommitted review points, inactive commitments can remain nominally current indefinitely unless the participant initiates cleanup."},{"mechanism_slug":"dependency_safe_delete_check","role":"Checks whether an active goal, coping sequence, reinforcement plan, or safety-related routine relies on the candidate commitment and blocks archival while an unresolved dependency remains.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the dependency gate, demoting a seemingly unused prerequisite could break a larger behavioral sequence or an authorized safety plan."},{"mechanism_slug":"soft_delete_quarantine_window","role":"Hides a retired commitment from ordinary cueing while retaining it in a reversible quarantine for a period determined by its dependency and recovery impact.","counterfactual_removal":"Without quarantine, an accidental or impulsive retirement could erase a useful plan before its loss becomes apparent."},{"mechanism_slug":"tombstone_or_deletion_marker","role":"Preserves the retired commitment's identity, disposition date and reason, and successor link so absence cannot be mistaken for nonexistence or silent failure.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a marker, later reflection could not reliably distinguish an intentionally superseded strategy from one never attempted or accidentally lost."},{"mechanism_slug":"archive_restore_test","role":"Periodically exercises restoration of sampled archived commitments, including their cue, response, history, dependencies, and successor links.","counterfactual_removal":"Without an end-to-end restore test, archival may appear to preserve learning history while formats, links, or retrieval procedures quietly become unusable."}],"causal_chain":["Successive behavior-change attempts deposit commitments faster than participants explicitly retire them.","The ledger inventories each commitment and makes its age, enactment, endorsement, context, dependencies, and lifecycle state inspectable.","A participant-selected slot budget creates a bounded active tier for commitments currently allowed to generate cues.","When the tier fills or a lease expires, recency and value signals rank unpinned commitments for review rather than automatically deleting them.","The participant checks current intent, contextual fit, dependencies, successor relationships, and preservation exceptions before choosing a disposition.","Renewed commitments remain active; others move to paused, superseded, quarantine, or archive states and stop generating ordinary cues.","Disposition markers preserve strategy lineage, while quarantine and tested archives allow mistaken retirements or context-relevant plans to be restored.","The visible portfolio contains fewer simultaneously operative commitments while the history of attempted strategies remains available for reflection and reuse."],"baseline":"Goal trackers and coaching worksheets generally present commitments as active, completed, skipped, or manually archived. Participants add new goals and reminders as priorities change, but active capacity is not explicitly budgeted, review leases are uncommon, dependencies are rarely checked before retirement, and archived items may be separated from the reasoning and successor relationships needed to interpret or restore them.","nearest_rivals":["Goal-prioritization exercises that rank current goals once but provide no continuing expiration, archival, or restoration lifecycle","Task managers that cap daily tasks or allow manual archiving without distinguishing behavioral commitments, prerequisites, and safety exceptions","Reminder snoozing or notification-rate limits that suppress cues temporarily while leaving the underlying commitment nominally active","Periodic coaching reviews that reconcile goals through conversation but do not retain machine-inspectable lifecycle states and disposition lineage","Goal summarization that compresses many commitments into themes but may erase conflicts, prerequisites, and the history of superseded strategies"],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal is specifically testable as lifecycle governance for accumulated behavior-change commitments: a bounded active tier, preassigned review leases, participant-authorized demotion, dependency gates, reversible quarantine, and restorable strategy history operate together. Rivals that merely prioritize goals, mute reminders, summarize plans, or conduct occasional review do not implement this complete causal path.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The participant controls admission, renewal, pausing, supersession, archival, and restoration of ordinary commitments. A coach may recommend changes but cannot silently change participant-owned goals. Commitments explicitly linked to a clinical safety or crisis plan are pinned and may be changed only through the plan's existing authorized review process. The ranking system has advisory authority only.","authorized_first_step":"Use synthetic commitment portfolios in a usability study where participants configure an active-slot budget and make simulated lifecycle decisions; no live reminders, clinical plans, or personal records are altered.","excluded_actions":["Automatically declaring a goal invalid, irrational, or completed","Automatically destroying a commitment or its behavioral history","Evicting a participant-pinned or safety-linked commitment","Using nonperformance as a diagnosis or character judgment","Allowing a coach or operator to impose hidden goals or renewals","Sending archived or quarantined commitments as ordinary reminders","Changing a clinical safety or crisis plan outside its existing authorized process","Inferring that age alone makes a commitment unworthy"],"halt_rollback":"Halt if participants mistake review ranking for an instruction, cannot identify which commitments are active, lose access to a needed coping plan, or encounter an unresolved dependency after demotion. In any later reversible pilot, disable capacity-triggered proposals and lease-triggered review, restore all paused or quarantined commitments to their previous visibility, preserve the disposition log, and return to the baseline workspace."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Maintaining several concurrent commitments may support identity, flexibility, or opportunistic action, while repeatedly reviewing inactive goals could increase rumination or make ordinary lapses unnecessarily salient. Participants may also manage commitment priority adequately without explicit lifecycle machinery.","problem_falsifier":"In a bounded observational task, participants can consistently identify their operative commitments, accumulated inactive plans do not generate conflicting cues or material retrieval burden, and active-set size, unmarked supersession, and repeated dismissal are unrelated to confusion about present intentions.","intervention_falsifier":"Against an ordinary goal list, the ledger fails to improve identification and recall of currently endorsed commitments, or it increases missed prerequisites, accidental loss of useful plans, perceived coercion, rumination, review burden, or restoration errors beyond predeclared tolerances.","risks":["A numerical ranking may create false precision about the personal value of a commitment.","The active-slot budget could feel coercive or encourage premature abandonment.","Recency-based demotion may disadvantage important but infrequent coping plans.","Repeated review of abandoned goals could evoke shame or rumination.","Participants may renew commitments mechanically to avoid confronting goal conflict.","Implicit or offline dependencies may be missed by the dependency check.","Safety-linked pinning may become an unreviewed permanent exception.","Archived behavioral history may contain sensitive personal information requiring access controls.","A restored commitment may no longer fit the participant's present context."]},"next_evidence_step":"Conduct a preregistered, non-clinical crossover usability study using synthetic portfolios containing current, obsolete, conflicting, prerequisite, superseded, infrequent-but-important, and safety-pinned commitments. Compare an ordinary chronological goal list with a read-only Ledger prototype. Measure correct identification of the operative set, missed dependencies, inappropriate demotion of pinned items, time to resolve a full active tier, reconstruction of why a strategy was retired, restoration fidelity, perceived coercion, and short-form rumination or shame responses. Do not send reminders, alter real goals, or enroll participants whose safety plans would be implicated; stop if any safety-pinned item can be demoted or restored without its required authorization.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 governs clinician-authored hypotheses about a patient so stale interpretations do not retain evidentiary authority in care. This proposal instead governs participant-owned behavioral commitments whose accumulation competes for a bounded cueing and attention tier. Its intervention is an active-slot and sunset ledger, its primary decision-maker is the participant, and its causal path runs from commitment accumulation through capacity-triggered demotion to reduced cue conflict while preserving strategy history. It does not manage clinical formulations, diagnostic reasoning, signed notes, or clinicians' interpretation of patient evidence, and it can be adopted independently in a non-clinical behavior-change program.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Generate proposal index 2 as a complete candidate","Address a materially different psychology problem from proposal 1","Use a distinct intervention and causal path while preserving layer-lifecycle structure","Explain diversity from every earlier sealed proposal"],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}