Makes sense!

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Many people’s days don’t start and end in the same date. Think about those who work “the late shift”. I’m wondering how they describe their day. Do they still use the date or day of week?

In any case, it makes sense to allow people to have extended days and assign a time of day which their 24 hour day starts. (I also wonder about people with “non-24” disorder https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/non-24-hour-sleep-wake-disorder/)

I’m mostly posting this to ensure the Bearable programmers and its users see the bigger picture around this request.

What I typically do when I’m still up past midnight is go back to the day that I’ve been awake for and track it with what time it is. This will inevitably have my meds from Tue on Tue @1am. I know it’s technically Wed rather than 24 houra earlier, but I get an idea of how late it was etc

Yes! I have this issue with a lot of apps (step counters, calorie trackers, etc). I’d love if we could choose what our ‘day’ is - I’d probably go from 3am to 3am, rather than midnight to midnight.

No idea how complex this is from a design perspective, but it would be so useful!

As someone with Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, I have this same problem too. My “day” usually starts after midday and ends a couple hours before sunrise, so I keep getting my inputs misplaced in the wrong day. Being able to customise when a “day” starts and ends for someone would be highly appreciated.

And when I was still trying to adjust to “acceptable social times” I’ve also suffered from non-24/free-running and other circadian rhythm issues, so I get what Peter Blum says. Maybe the option to change the start/duration time at a per-day basis if needed could help? 🤔

A related bit of this IS mentioned in the Considering or Planned section (I forget what, phone navigation is hard). They’re trying to figure out the best way to balance between the simplicity of general time segments, and specific timestamps, since both have their use, but it makes it hard to line up graphs for people with offset schedules.

But yeah, I have non-24/free-running too. It makes tracking stuff REALLY hard.

I like that idea of picking when our day starts. Beyond just a general “Set days to start at (time)” which would work great for night-owls. Because sometimes things happen at night before your mental-day has ended, and it can be irregular, even without our rare (and VERY unfortunate) disorders. And likewise, sometimes something comes up and you have to start and end your day earlier than usual.

So, I wonder if we could first set a default that usually seems to work for us (the app treats it as situational or a segment rather than universally hard-coded, and just internally enters it itself each day. That way if we change it later, it won’t offset and mess up previous entries maybe?). But then also, there can be a button at the top of each day that says “Today’s ‘midnight’ started at: (time).” And we can either leave it at its default, or slide it earlier or later

Maybe even, if we track our sleep in the app, then when we submit our sleep hours (or if we used an external connected app/wearable), it can ask in a little extra field in the Sleep section, it can say “Today’s ‘midnight’ started at (calculated time right in the middle of our total sleep period)?” with either “Yes”, “Keep default (time it’s set to)”, or “Choose time,” whereupon you can select the time you count the day as starting?

And the day page’s original heading can then be automatically updated to reflect the user’s decision. (I know it’s slightly redundant, but it not everyone tracks sleep, yet they still might need to set that time. Yet if you do track it, then it’s handier to have your sleep time and a suggested midpoint right there to help you decide.

Just a random idea I coughed up, feel free to kick it around a little until it shines or breaks. 😉

Yes please!

YES I also have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome and Narcolepsy, I would recommend something similar to Medisafe’s Pillbox settings to adjust day rollover overall, since it would be useful to most people.

But the idea of having dynamic custom day ranges every single day would be a LIFESAVER, although it sounds much more difficult to implement I would definitely pay premium just for that, especially if there were automatic Sleep Tracking integration like ZaCloud mentioned.

I would also add on, if the custom day ranges were implemented an Insight-driven extension could be setting a “target day range” for those who want to get their sleep/day schedule on track. So for example if you are trending to wake up later and later each day but have a wake-up target of 9am the Insight could alert you and give tips on how to adjust your sleep cycle. Same would go for day length for those of us with circadian rhythm disorders who still want to have a target of consecutive productive hours before sleeping. It would be nice to have a “congratulations! You’ve been awake for 10 hours” or something as well as a warning like “time to sleep, you’ve been up for 18 hours!!” for example.

My day is shifted – I’m mostly sleeping late after midnight long into the day. I have the feeling this is affecting analysis in bearable since it’s starting a new day at midnight and in fact most symptoms and medications loose impact during my sleep time. It would be great if I could add some offset to the day. (Sorry for duplicate posting this answer – more than one suggestion could help here)

I asked about this not long after the app’s creation, as I also function mainly on weird hours. I was told the main thing is it’s extremely difficult to customize different start times to the day and still maintain the ability to compare data as effectively as the app currently does (from a coding perspective), especially if that “day”/range ever changes.

It’s probably on their advanced list. Just know that, long story short, most apps which allow that kind of adjustment are extremely simple in their data sorting and don’t even necessarily acknowledge dates so much as just a “data input within time range” type thing. Bearable’s organization into a date format (presumably drawn from your phone’s time/date) ensures no data goes missing and allows much larger datasets without error. I get the impression changing that into a customizable time would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, without reworking the entire foundation of the app – effectively making a new app.

But hopefully I’m wrong! Hopefully they’ll figure out a workaround. I just wanted to draw attention to what a big ask this specific request is, again having made it myself.

Yeah, I would LOVE this feature too and voted for it months ago, but after a longer use of the app I understand now that it would be complicated to implement. So with time I’ve learnt to “work” around it and it doesn’t bother me much anymore.

I would personally prefer the devs focusing their time on things I would consider more urgent and easier to implement ^^ And leave this kind of complicated stuff for when all that is done ;)

(But I understand how it could be an issue for people who can’t find a way to make it work as it is :( )

this could be easily implemented i think by allowing the user to edit/customize the timeframes for pre/am/mid/pm

The accountant in me says it makes no sense. I can see the other side though, and having the ability to have a flex might be an idea. My question would be though for those desiring it, when the doctor asks about when your symptoms start or end, how do you reply?

When my doctor asks me about, say, when I did X or when Y happened, I will respond in reference to when I went to bed/sleep, not based on midnight. If I go see a doctor at 3pm and I had migraines until 2am, but they were gone by the time I woke up again, I will tell the doctor I had migraines yesterday, but that today I’m fine.
Or say I’m taking a certain medication before going to bed. On Day 1 I go to bed at 2am and the next day (21 hours later) at 11pm – these two medication doses should be considered to have been taken on two consecutive days. With the current system, they’re counted as having occurred on the same day, unless I manually re-assign them.

Yes!! Other apps make this easy by letting you choose your preferred time that counts as end of day in the settings menu

Yes!! Other apps make this easy by letting you choose your preferred time that counts as end of day in the settings menu

A day-by-day basis would be fantastic, if it’s doable at all. I sleep when I need to for as long as I need to, and my bedtime varies wildly. I usually sleep at least 12 hours, and as many as 22, and am then awake anywhere from 12 to 36 hours. I use the Sleep As Android app to track my sleep, so that’s no problem, but when trying to note how long I slept and when, in other apps, I consistently struggle with where and how to enter it. Do I go by calendar day/time? Do I treat it like Animal Crossing and have 12am-6am count as the weekday before? Those are my own problems, but some way to change where the day reset is in Bearable would be very useful.

THE ABILITY TO ADJUST WHEN TO START/END DAYS 🙌 pretty please 🙏

I think you could allow people to set their normal bedtime and out-of-bed time. So the day would reset just after their bedtime or before they wake up by default instead of midnight. You could also ask people when they’d like to update info into Bearable: in the morning and/or at bedtime.

Then there could be an option to manually confirm bedtime - potentially you could get a prompt to confirm that you’re winding down for bed and are updating your app and taking nighttime meds (or have just woken up and have taken morning meds).

Then once you’ve input your info for the day, you can choose to ‘end the day’ (or ‘begin the day’). If you don’t do this, the day will just end/ begin according to the default schedule you input.

Just a suggestion - I’d find this the most useful for myself. I use a time tracker on my asthma inhaler and have set ‘midnight’ to take place at 3am as I normally go to bed late. This stops it saying I’ve double-dosed if I take my nighttime meds after midnight. But it’s confusing having to do the math to work out the ‘real’ time I took a dose

This would be a very useful and important feature for me!

Thank you everyone for upvoting this suggestion.

We haven’t forgotten about this!

As our dev team grows we hope to get around this suggestion as soon as we can.

Thank you all for bearing with us!

The Bearable Team

Just adjusting when the day changes over would be huge for me! In my case, I would prefer to input data before midnight, but the idea is the same. I love bearable, but it does NOT work with my schedule!

I work graveyard shift, and my shift starts at midnight. On work days, I take meds before I go to work, at like 11:30 PM. On my days off, I sleep in a little, like most people. If I put accurate times, bearable says I take 2x my meds on some days and 0x on others, just because one is slightly before midnight and one is slightly after.

My current workaround is to mark it as the correct time (it is important to know the exact time), but move it to the previous day if I take meds after midnight, but this is really not ideal, especially because my meds affect me the “next day” once I get to work.

And that’s just for meds! Sleep, work hours (if I go in early), food, mood averages, and all kinds of other things are affected by the day shifting at the wrong time.

Eve time category needed pls. I’m late body clock and eve is my best time usually so could almost do with eve1 and eve2. Thx

I can definitely see why this would be complicated to implement in terms of database architecture, but I think it’s pretty crucial. I’m very rarely asleep before midnight, and if I want to log something that occurred after midnight I currently have no idea whether I’m supposed to include it in “yesterday’s” log or “tomorrow’s“, and how either approach would affect my insights.

It’s a very interesting problem from a technical point of view. One way of looking at it, I suppose, would be to imagine Bearable as a physical diary, with a page for each day. When would you turn the page? It probably wouldn’t be at midnight. I think you’d probably turn the page whenever you woke up the next morning, to record the time that you woke up.

So perhaps the solution is to take the “woke up” time inputted by the user, and to record that to the database as a “day started at” time for the current date.

Then, anything in the database that has today’s date but is timestamped before the “day started at” date can be considered to have taken place the previous day (even though it technically happened today), and can be displayed as such to the user.

I think that would fit better with the way people actually think about times and dates.

(This is fascinating, btw - let me know if you need a new team member…!)

I have a sleeping disorder and my usual day is from noon to 4 am. I take medications after midnight and a lot of what I do is in between the existing blocks. It makes it hard to track what happened in a specific day.

an easy way to implement this would be a “personal midnight” setting that would allow the user to choose a time between, for example, 12am and 6am that they consider to be the end of their personal day

It’s very unfortunate that there’s no implemented solution for this :(

A suggestion on how a solution may work is having in the settings page an adjustable input for “time day finishes”. E.g. If 5am is inputted, the 6 hour blocks of a day adjust accordingly

E.g. If.. day finishes at 5am, Then.. <-11am, 5-11pm, 11pm-4am, 4am - >

Without this functionality, it takes me a lot longer to manually adjust and manipulate the times :(. And I often accidentally input info on the wrong day as “today” ends up being the incorrect date

I have more or less given up on the attempt to mark things down by dates. It does skew my data, cause some days I take no medications and some I take double, as I take them before bed. I like the above mentioned “diary page” approach, where you can tell the app that no day is done.

I’ve found some ways to work around this, but some things are unfixable as it currently stands. For instance, sleep aid insights are often useless when I take some of them 9-11:59pm and some of them 12-4am. I try a lot of sleep aids and I really want to know how effective they all are, but obviously if I take one at 2am because I thought I could sleep without it and I was wrong, that sleep aid won’t be counted toward the “next day effect” for lots of symptoms that might be relevant (irritability, drowsiness, etc.). If I take the same sleep aid at 11pm some days and 1am other days, I’ll have no idea what I’m looking at for “same day” vs. “next day” effects.

I don’t know if it’s significantly easier to allow a static change (e.g., every day starts at 5am) rather than dynamic ones (e.g., yesterday was 12/12 7am to 12/13 5am; today is 12/13 5am to 12/14 6am), but if it is, please implement this sooner. There are a lot of things that wreck my insights with the current structure.

My schedule means my most active times are midnight to 3 am. Would love this!

Yes this is frustrating with all of the apps such as fitbit etc as well; my day ends at 2am on average, and I will only remember half of the things at bedtime.

As someone who suffers from severe insomnia this would be fabulous!

Chiming in to reiterate how important this is to a huge number of people. This app is used by a large proportion of the ME/CFS community, which is one of many chronic illnesses that wreaks havoc on one’s sleep patterns. Since management of ME/CFS relies very heavily on tracking pretty much every variable of one’s life in order to identify triggers and determine “pacing” thresholds, accurate timestamps are immensely helpful. One of the great things about this app is its ability to compile data and identify trends, and this would be much more accurate if our “day” could be adjusted.

I understand that constant time-frame changes (i.e. adjusting the start and end of each day individually) may make it very difficult to compile data for trends/correlations. A workaround that I’ve seen in a couple apps is to create a setting that allows the user to choose when their day ends, and applies that to all data until the setting is changed.

For example: I set my day to end at 5am. This doesn’t change the definition of morning vs afternoon vs night, it just lumps together data from 5:00am until 4:59am the following day. It’s still a 24-hour period, and every day is the same. My schedule varies day to day, but I choose 5am because I know I will almost never end my day after 5am or start my day before 5am. If I experience a big shift in my schedule, I can adjust that time accordingly and the new time will apply from that day forward.

It isn’t a perfect system for those with highly fluid schedules, but it’s a lot better than being stuck with the standard 24-hour day, and still allows the algorithm to compile data by comparing 24-hour segments.

This. I think just being able to change the start/end time would fix many of these issues!

Adding my voice to this discussion, this would be super helpful! I almost always log my end of day entry after midnight.

What about a simple prompt when logging after midnight, asking, ‘Has your day ended yet?’ This way, users can choose whether to log the entry as part of the current or next day, without needing to set a custom start time. It would be an easy way to accommodate those with irregular schedules

I have an idea that can be use without changing the start of the day each time.

I currently have a system for that in my paper note and when communicate with friend past midnight. it’s the 24+ system✨ just continu to count after 24 to stay in the same day. like 2 am will be 26:00