Excited that you are looking into it! Thank you!

This would make custom tracking truly useful. It could just add an extra key/value for count, which could easily be used for either quantity or duration, or that could be 2 separate data points. I’d love to be able to increment things throughout the day by just tapping a tag again, like cups of coffee for example. But being able to add a duration (E.g. meditation) would also be awesome, and wouldn’t necessarily work with the “tally counter” UI. looking forward to any version of it, though!

This would truly round out Exist into its full potential and solve a lot of problems. For example, the inability to track mood more than once a day, the inability to easily track word count, time spent reading, time spent on work (not through RescueTime), time spent on social media, etc. etc. I have been tracking custom data points manually in a spreadsheet for years. I’m loving Exist, but if I had this capability, I’d be able to ditch the spreadsheet and just use Exist and it’s connected apps. Thanks!

I love this idea. I’ve been using a kludge right now by creating separate tags like “Coffee1”, “Coffee2” and “Coffee3” to track how much coffee I have in a given day. (I use a similar method for sleep - tracking whether or not I got above 7 hours. But this would add a bunch of usability for me.

Yes, especially if we could update the custom attribute via API.

Yes!! 👍

I would love this

Also very much in favor of this. Seconding the coffee idea as a particularly simple but useful example. Each day I tag “coffee” but that doesn’t really tell me much, when number of coffees really would.

This is really the last step for me, in terms of making Exist genuinely powerful. If I had the ability to track custom attributes like “words written” or “coffees” or “minutes spent meditating”, I could use Exist to dial-in on what makes for a productive, happy day. Tags are great, but they’re too coarse-grained to handle a lot of the things I want to be optimising.

Galen, funnily enough for those specific attributes you can already use the API if you are determined! We have attributes already for words_written, coffees, and meditation_min that just don’t have any sources we yet integrate, but are ready to take data.

I get your broader point though. There’s always more to do.

This is exactly the feature I was looking for while applying to the 30 days trial (a few hours ago). Is this going to be implemented in a near future (a few months) ?

If not, I don’t really know yet if I am going to maintain my subscription (but maybe I will).

Hey Maxime! This is only a suggestion, and as mentioned in the description, not officially planned, so that’s a negative.

I’m enthusiastic for this one to hit the API! This could open the door to a lot of simple custom, less-conventional integrations. (I’m prototyping a simple PagerDuty integration that tracks when you’re “on call”; with numbered tracking, it could be used to track number of times alerted.)

This seems essential. There is no way that you (the app developers) could possibly stay up to date on all possible things that people might want to add. I’ve had direct personal experience with people who are desperate for solutions, e.g., pain management. Some of them use hand drawn heat maps to attempt to correlate multiple variables and their values. If you seriously consider doing this, I’d be happy to provide a full design including schema and UML diagram that would be compatible with statistical analysis and handle additional needs such as raw values from source data.

This would be nice for pomodoro users, to log in some exercises, and so on.

That is very good. If you can make the tags have multi-level will solve it. ex: a tag called “Productivity” can have numeric level which can be custimized the unit by user.

I found myself wanting exactly this as well! I want to do a variation of time tracking where I time the number of hours per day on a specific project. That’s different from “productive time”, since time on this project may or may not be considered productive. I was thinking about doing the “custom1,custom2,custom3” hack but that seems really ugly. I would much rather have native support for custom tracking!

This would be the perfect solution to being able to track my Peak Expiratory Flow (L/min) for Asthma.

I would love to see this happen as well.

this would be great to track how many times in a day you take migraine meds, the pain level of a migraine, as well as what everyone else has mentioned!

I’ve got a work in progress web app up and running which aims to provide an interface to all Exist data along with converting custom tags into usable values. My main goal was to generate charts for my doctor, which I’ve now accomplished, and being an open source developer I thought I’d share my work so far.

All the app really does at the moment is spit out charts (because that was the point), but basically, it can detect custom tags which specify numeric values, and group together string values. The format is “(tag) (value) (label)”

Examples: * pef 500 = numeric value ‘500’ for ‘pef’ * pain 3 high = numeric value ‘3’ for ‘pain’ labelled ‘high’ * symptom insomnia = string value for ‘symptom’ labelled ‘insomnia’ * event all nighter = string value for ‘event’ labelled ‘all nighter’

Currently, I’m just using the Exist app to update my tags according to this format, though once I get to writing the editor there will be a proper interface to rate a day in a more traditional fashion.

URL: https://exist.redeclipse.net/ GitHub: https://github.com/exist-sense/core

Feel free to play around with it, watch the repo for updates, or submit an issue on GitHub to make feature requests. If there’s enough interest I’ll look at expanding this further as needed.

Nice work, Quiton! You should share this in the forum.

One caveat with using tags this way is that you won’t always get useful correlations from them — because pain 1, pain 2, pain 3 etc. are all separate tags, we can only correlate one at a time, so we won’t be able to combine them to compare pain levels against other attributes. Obviously this gets worse for the different number of tags you have — if the numeric value is between 1 and 500, correlations for any one of these tags will be only 1/500th as useful. This might be an acceptable compromise for you, but it’s one you should make knowing the tradeoffs.

Yeah, I realised early on the correlations wouldn’t work right, but I’m relying more on the graphs for comparisons with the custom values (they’re for experiments anyway!).

And sure, I’ll cross post my announcement to the forum. Wanted to ping those who want custom values in order to get further input on it.

I’m going to go a little crazy and say – make sure to support negative numbers… I currently pretend “negative” tags with an “x” so they all sort separate and I immediately get a feel for the intuitive impact I expected from that tag on my day.

But, if the numbers went negative, then I would just use the negatives for perceived “negative” impactors. It would be interesting to see correlations that flew in the face of my expectations, like thinking that FB time was bad, but it turned out to be a good thing in terms of how it correlated with other things.

I know we try to stick with hard data, but I think it’s good to allow for some tracking of expectations so we can later see more plainly how the data shows patterns that run counter to our expectations. Without this, I think we can miss the significance of particular correlations (we tend to mis-remember things when staring data in the face, and rationalize what we thought before to conform with the hard facts). When we do this, we miss the opportunity to improve/adapt that these offer.

What are some examples of tags you’d track that require a negative value?

Anything I considered a negative attribute: coffee drank, times on Social Media, news articles read, TV watched, fear, anger(not a lot of these last two, but I like to track anyway), dense carbs eaten, busy-stress, headaches…

I would replace my current two-tier tag system with this. It might also do to simply mark a tag as “positive” or “negative” leaning, but I’m not sure how much that would complicated the UI. Just allowing for negative numbers might not require any tweaks other than how we declare the counter variables, and make the feature available to power users without complicating the interface for new users… food for thought anyway.

Ah, I’m glad I asked. This isn’t how counting values for tags would work, and more importantly how correlations work. A negative value for an attribute doesn’t imply the attribute is something negative.

Is there another use for negative values? My point is more about allowing us to indicate ahead of time if we feel a tag is positive or negative. The negative values seems like an elegant possible vehicle.

It’s much nicer for me to keep my tags sorted this way instead of all mashed up, so I have more of an intuitive feel for how well the day went as I captured my journal entry (before I see the weekly/daily correlation reports)

I’m open to supporting negative values as people may want to track something like temperature where a negative is valid. The initial use case will be quantities, though, so that may come later.

Tags wouldn’t be sorted by value but by name as they are now, so I’m not sure what you mean about sorting. You can always rename tags to better group them together.

Thanks for investing the time to explore this further with me.

Perhaps the use case is too specific, but I just like to know my bias on how I expect a tag to affect things (positively or negatively) as I’m looking at the correlations and when I write my journal. I currently do this by prepending all the negative tags with a “z” to sort them down to the bottom.

It just seemed like having a way to show how negative of an impact I expect (e.g. using negative numbers for the amount is coffee drank) would be useful. But, I can see where some people would think that some coffee is good and a lot bad, so that use case gets muddy.

If you did make negatives available, then I would use them as a way to separate those I expect to have negative impacts versus positive impacts.

The question I have in my mind is: how big of an impact does a expected negative influencer (like coffee) have on my other activities during the day. This process of identifying the influences I think are positive and negative helps motivate me towards positive activities and more away from the negatives. Exist helps me see what’s actually correlating so I can validate or challenge these pre-conceptions. I try to always keep the axiom about correlation not causation in mind as I think through the results and what I should change as a result.

PS – Sorry to pick on coffee, I’m just not much of a fan based on the books I’ve read.

Sorry if this is too out there – I tend to think of Exist as a service that helps people make improvements in their life versus the nuts and bolts cool correlation engine that shows us all kinds of connections we did or didn’t expect. I realize it’s a little of both and you must make the touch choices for what to add (and also subtract) to keep the approach elegant.

I totally get what you’re aiming for, but I think your method of categorising names of tags is the correct one here, you’ve already found the solution 😄 A negative integer does not denote a negative effect on the user, that’s confusing quantity (“I had ‘negative three’ coffees”) with correlation outcome (“I have a worse day when I drink more coffee”).

No worries – I started my professional career as a white hat hacker for global 1000 companies, so I tend to think outside the norms for how we usually use things as a habit. As always, please use the interesting bits and ignore the rest. 🙏

I mostly enjoy seeing the process for how you’re choosing your development path, as I’m gearing up to do my own timer/pomodoro style app.

Maybe I’ve missed something, but: a) wouldn’t an easy way to do this be to simply to do the same thing as the Mood attribute but let the user choose the name for it (although this limits the range of values to 1-5 its better than nothing); b) this would also be a solution to the Suggestion to rate Energy level, so any votes for Energy level can be added to this, giving it the highest vote! Since you have already done all the code for the Mood attribute, isn’t it easy for you to do this? So don’t understand why you have not plans to do it....

While porting the Mood rating to Energy level might work, it’s going to be useful for the range of values I suspect most people might have in mind. It’s also (in my opinion) clunkier than the value ranges available for temperature or email. I find it more useful to know the value goes up with certain tags than to know value(X) happens more with certain tags.

It’s very easy to proclaim something easy from the outside 🙂 there’s a lot more to it than you suggest Strahan. Also, as Linden mentioned, a 1-5 scale would work for few other custom attributes, so it’d still be a lot of work for a rather inadequate solution. Better to work up to doing it properly.

My thoughts were along these lines as well Josh… round peg, square hole feeling – especially from a UI perspective.

As a slight aside, I wondered if it would be easy to make that when we enter our journal and tags, we don’t have to hit save on both tabs separately (iPhone). It’s a petty thing, but would make things just a touch more convenient every evening when I do this.

Cheers!

I think the “double save” thing is more for the average user, who don’t necessarily make use of tags and just rate their day then back out of the process. I don’t think it is feasible to save upon backing out because the general expectation is that would cancel without saving.

I had the same thought originally, but looking at it from a developer perspective, I saw the method to the madness.

@Quinton – I see, so when we switched views, then we would have to use that trigger to put the rating / memo or tags into temporary variables (depending on which view we switched from.), and then only save these variables permanently if the actual “save” button was pressed. Not sure if there is something I’m missing, but my understanding of iOS / Swift coding is that this should work in a relatively straightforward way.

Please try to keep the conversation on topic (values for custom tags) for everyone who is subscribed to this task and gets email notifications 🙂

It’s something we’d like to support long-term, but there’s still a lot of stuff already planned to come first, plus some more first-party integrations. We might reevaluate its viability after that.

So for me, this feature is more like a custom value in general and not necessarily a tag.

Tags are binary. Either present or absent. These custom values are an axis. Like “steps” or “heart rate”. I guess what I’m looking for is the ability to log something totally custom in a generic way. If you put an api in front of this then now you pave the way for possibility of all custom integrations.

I can imagine the following apis

• Increment(date, axis, n)
• Decrement(date, axis, n)
• Set(date, axis, n)
• GetValue(date, axis)

• SetSample(date, axis, id, n)
• ListSamples(date, axis)
• RemoveSample(date, axis, Id)
• GetValue(date, axis)

From this set of samples you can average, min, max etc

With these things I can now log arbitrary things:

• pomodoros completed using a Counter
• Meditation minutes using a Counter
• Grams of poop poo’d using a Counter (who knows)
• Average decibels of night sound using Mean of samples
• Peak decibels of night sound using Max (thinking some sort of sound level monitor)
• Average mood using Mean (multi sample)
• Average peak flow (asthema)
• Max peak flow (asthema)

I feel like there might be a case for putting the onus on the user to compute averages/max/mins and just use a Counter to set a value via Set(n). The Set thing is just a nice api that would be easy to use for custom stuff where you don’t want to compute it yourself (e.g. A simple custom average mood value) and allow exist to correlate things perhaps unexpected by the user.

(and this changemap thing really needs an edit - I have given up formatting after deleting three times for fear that I’m spamming subscribers to this suggestion)

Yes, or at least a preview and a link to a Markdown reference for those unfamiliar with it, fair point.

+1 for me… Additional bonus of this is that you will get an unofficial wish-list of integrations to make in the future.... When you see a ton of “HouseTemp” custom values for example…

I would like to use this feature to track fasting hours for example… thank you

I’m really surprised this doesn’t exist already, to be honest – I signed up assuming Exist would let you track your own attributes and have them show up in graphs, and it was disappointing to find otherwise.

In addition to what others have said, building this also mean that users can effectively build any integration they want without waiting for first-party support.

Exist has historically been about automatic tracking from third-party services, so that there’s little effort on users to keep their data up-to-date. It’s only recently that we’ve added any manual data outside mood tracking.

Some interesting research going on into automating even the mood tracking piece:

https://www.quora.com/When-will-there-be-an-automatic-mood-tracker

(I’ve never heard of the other app the author mentions – I’m happy with exist!)

Halsted, if you’re on iOS, probably the easiest way to do this would be using the Workflow app. If you check out the Exist user forum, I’ve posted a couple of different workflows in there for use with custom tags. Using our API docs, it shouldn’t take much to adjust one of those workflows to work for words_written rather than custom tags. Feel free to reach out and I can help you get this working—I may also write up a blog post about this in future.

(Not sure what will happen with Workflow when Shortcuts is released with iOS 12, but hopefully those workflows will still work in some form.)

This is what I bought Exist for.

I’m sorry you’re paying for Exist in order to get a feature it doesn’t have! I can’t give you any guarantees that this’ll get added or when, so I hope you found Exist useful enough during your free trial that you decided to begin a subscription based on what it does already do, rather than what it doesn’t.

I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings. It does as you say have a free trial.

I only meant to say that I engaged the product eyes-open - no ability to handle arbitrary scalars. But the API allows it, and of course the core/default element of ‘how good was your day’ is exactly the thing, as are dozens of the add-ins. So I figured it wouldn’t be long.

I decided to pay for it for a while to see if I could get utility out of purely privative stuff, betting that either someone would add it or I would whip up a custom application using the API.

We’ll see! Thanks for a neat product, I’m glad you’re making it!

This sounds like a real beneficial option. Thank you for working on it!

This is what I signed up for, hoping that Exist could it. I don’t see much value in the automatic data, but I would love to be able to quantify my custom inputs (as well as track them several times a day). I can’t find an app that will do this, but I am thrilled that Exist has this on the radar, and am keen to see it implemented.

One of the reasons I’m trying this app out is to see if I can have one app that tracks all my stats in one place. The visualization of your app is great so thought this would be the one to potentially use.

This + previous day correlations are the killer features Exist requires to be truly useful. Without these, I am still doing most of my tracking in a spreadsheet.

Couldn’t agree more!

Regarding previous day correlations, perhaps you could do a monthly refresh or something? Where it recorrelates older stuff? Or maybe quarterly?

This is the most important feature possible, and to prove that, here’s just a few other features under consideration and in suggestions on this changemap achievable using this one feature, and how:

• Energy level - Make your own “energy level” attribute, and feed it whatever data you want!
• Duolingo - Integrate with Duolingo’s open duolingo.com/users/ JSON data fetch (no API key required) and make whatever language learning attributes you want!
• Multiple mood entries per day - Make your own “mood” attribute, with that level of granularity
• Blood Pressure from Apple Health - Make your own “blood pressure” attribute, using Apple’s HealthKit API
• Medication tracking - Make your own “medication” attribute, and feed it data however you want!
• Ignore (more) words from “frequent words per rating” - Make your own “frequent words” attribute, with whatever filters in whichever language you want!
• ALL OF THESE, given you already have a data source - Mint, Toggl, Evernote, Slack, trakt.tv, Steam, Trello, YouTube, Outlook calendars, Office 365, Waze, Habitica, People you’re with, Apple Health Stand Hours, Sleep breakdown from Fitbit, Zapier, Recurring events, RescueTime categories/custom goals, TripIt, You Need A Budget (YNAB), Feedly, Samsung S Health, Distance Travelled/Distance from Home, Uber, Oura ring, Blood pressure from Withings, Pain tracking, Reddit

This feature would serve to reduce load on the Exist team for low-popularity tasks on this very changemap as well, as nearly all requests here are for attribute additions, and this feature would allow anyone to add essentially native attributes. Couple that with additional feature requests already under consideration/construction to allow users to view timelines for arbitrary attributes and compare them against each other for finding correlations, this means that anyone could develop attributes for anything, and then use them in the same fashion as native attributes.

Because nearly all feature requests here are for new attributes, opening up the attributes system to allow custom additions, complete with numeric values (and therefore basically equivalent to the built-in attributes) is basically the One Ring to Rule Them All.

If you want any development help on this one, feel free to reach out and I’d love to help :)

I appreciate the enthusiasm! However I think you’re misunderstanding what’s possible here on a few points. The biggest one is that this adds the ability to track an integer (whole number) total for a tag per day. Not text or decimal numbers.

• Multiple mood entries: tracking an integer doesn’t help here, this would not change.
• Blood pressure: isn’t represented as a single integer. Could work as two custom attributes perhaps.
• Ignore words on trends page: Integers wouldn’t help here, and this custom attribute wouldn’t be used in the Trends page, so for most people this isn’t useful.
• The list of integrations you mentioned: that’s all well and good for folks with programming skill, but for everyone else it is vastly more convenient for us to integrate those services directly. Plus again, only integers, which may not work in all scenarios. Most feature requests are for new integrations, which may or may not require new attributes. There are already popular productivity integrations, plus anything activity related, that could be integrated by the community using existing attributes. However, very few people have built anything so far. So I think it’s disingenuous to suggest the lack of this feature is the reason why — most folks would prefer we did the work internally. Which I totally understand!

I do agree this would open up the ability to track vastly more user-defined numbers, however, both via the apps and the API. I think we can all agree on that 🙂

I would also agree that having the ability to add our own trackers with numerical data, even if just a single integer value per day would make this vastly more flexible. Several attributes I would like to track are classed as impossible here, and whilst I appreciate it’s beyond your control if there’s no appropriate API, that doesn’t make it any less frustrating

I used to track several pieces of data in a spreadsheet for years and use an algorithm to create an overall figure for the day, and graph that. I dropped that in favour of Exist. Whilst I’m reasonably happy with Exist I haven’t seen any new integrations in recent months, unless I’ve missed them

Since this is a paid-for service it would be good to get this fundamental flexibility available, even if it doesn’t solve all the missing integrations suggested. I do think a lot of users would find it very useful. Would you be to evaluate the amount of work and estimate when it might be possible to achieve?

We sent out the annual survey not long ago, and posted the results, which you might’ve missed. Unfortunately manual tracking was not the top priority for the next year as decided by the majority of users. I appreciate that people have different priorities, but with limited time we have to build what benefits the most users. You can see our broad plans for the next year summarised at the end of that post.

That’s because 96% of your user base is using the app for tracking mood, which is already well quantified. I can’t imagine there is much growth potential beyond your current audience with the app functionality as it exists presently. Being able to quantify custom tags is one way to expand into a greater market. If nothing else add symptoms, medications, and supplements. HealthKit data correlation is (IMO) almost useless without the aforementioned. Imagine tracking blood pressure (just as an example) and correlating it weather or mood but not with the blood pressure medication. Makes no sense. Add this and you’ll be the first kid on the block to do so. Gyroscope is not far behind and prettier already. If you can’t expand the functionality I believe you’re better off refocusing on the feature it excels at - tracking mood. Perhaps condense the app by removing extraneous functionality and re-market as a cohesive mood tracker.

Hi Josh, it would be possible to use Samsung health as a source for the coffee attribute :)!

Yes, this is listed as a suggestion already: https://changemap.co/hellocode/exist/task/1432-samsung-s-health/

Thanks, I upvoted it!

Like others have said, I have kind of hacked the tags to try to make something like this work for me within the existing functionality. For now, let’s say I’m tracking “happy moments” and I think that more happy moments equate to an overall better mood. I set up happy0, happy1-3, happy4-6 and you get the idea.

This gives me some useful information, but it’s clunky and it’s not going to tell me where my tipping point on happy moments lies. I would love to have this feature. I’m looking at adding some other counter-style metrics to my overall life tracking and I’m sad to have to look outside exist to make that work better for me. I agree with the others that adding this feature would seriously level-up the exist capabilities.

I wasn’t a user at the time of the last survey, but I’ll look to vote for this feature at the end of the year.

I’d rather have this than all the other integrations combined, including all completed and all suggested. As your recent survey said, custom tags (and mood tracking) were rated most useful. So making them an order of magnitude more useful by allowing numerical values seems to me like the most utilitarian thing you can do with the app

This would be really great!

I just thought of a complication regarding this, if it were to be added.

For example, I tag coffee X1 for 1 coffee. If I have two coffees I tag coffee X2.

Now if you allow values to be assigned to an attribute like coffee I will have a hard time making use of it for historical data.

The only solution I can think of, is when tag mergering is completed, is for Exist to intelligently merge these tags, by manual action. E.g if I merge coffee X2, X3 etc into “coffee”, Exist will replace tags with coffee X2,X3 etc with just “coffee”but enter a value of “2”, “3”, etc for these days, as per the “X[number].

Any thoughts, comments?

This is far and away my biggest wishlist item for Exist.

I am planning on writing an official integration of Exist in to the super popular Home Automation platform Home Assistant, for which I am a developer, which would enable HA users to easily send all sorts of interesting custom attributes which HA already has easy access to. Examples:

• Hours or miles spent driving (comes from the HA iOS app)
• Hours spent at work/home (comes from a plethora of ways of doing location tracking in HA)
• Hours spent gaming (comes from HA’s Steam integration)
• Hours spent watching TV/movies (comes from a huge number of HA integrations with media players)

I am going to write this integration even without this ability, because being able to have HA push custom tags based on HA logic (visited the gym, worked from home, bad commute day, big TV day, big gaming day) would still be super useful, and I REALLY hope it drives some new Exist subscribers once it’s in. :)

That sounds really handy! We’re also adding some new attributes really soon that will cover a few of the things you’ve listed, so keep an eye on the developer section of the forum — it’ll be cool to fill those numeric attributes directly :)

I am planning on writing an official integration of Exist in to the super popular Home Automation platform Home Assistant

I am so happy to see that HA has made it to Exist. I would gladly welcome a HA component… and i’m sure a few HA users would be thrilled to discover Exist.

I have been using a . to delineate my labels with quantities. E.G.:

morning.coffee.1 and morning.coffee.2 and `morning.coffee.3 and $medication.1 $medication.2 … etc are all labels indicating the number of coffees that i’ve had this AM and doses of $medication ive taken.

The hope was that whenever numerical quantities are added to labels, they’d function like how @Reese Jenner uses them.

You may have better luck using Habitica for the habit +- feature and integrate that somehow.

This has more votes than many of the items in planned… as my use of Exist has matured, this has become more and more of a need.

I understand, but as mentioned previously, we’ve already made our priorities for this year of development, and as these aren’t yet complete, we can’t just go changing tack. Also, I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here or only elsewhere, but this one requires a lot of re-architecting of how Exist works, which means a lot of development time — if it were trivial we probably would’ve done it already 🙂

Thanks for considering my suggestion & pointing me in the right direction.

I have tried to find an app in which I can record my mood and daily headache score out of 10, basic, simple, no fuss. This is as close as I’ve got. A lot of the migraine specific apps are very detailed, whereas I’d love a feature to add what my headache score /10 next to my mood score on the home page (easy access)

I can see from your most recent comment it has been pushed back to later on but I’d love it was pushed higher up the queue.

Now planned! See the announcement post about what we’ll be adding in 2020.

This announcement is the best part of my day! So much great stuff, of which this specific issue is a very important part. Can’t wait to see it all live.

This announcement is awesome. =D Time to start sharpening my programming skills to leverage this to the fullest!!!

I’m so excited about every aspect of your plans for next year!

That are super great news - thanks a lot in advance for taking this challenge :) :) :) IMHO it’s the right and a very important move for Exist’s future.

Exciting news!

Wow that’s great!!

Pleased to hear this! I like that you’ve mentioned using times of day as the “added number” as well. I was wondering if this’ll work with other integrations or if that needs adding as a separate suggestion. I’m thinking of things like times of workouts being taken into account so you might get something like “you’re more productive when you workout before midday”.

This is awesome! The ability to add numerical values manually is something that will help Exist do what I need from it - become the central place where I manage my lifestyle data and replace four or five separate apps I use.

One query though: I noticed mention above that only integer values would be available and not decimals/floats. Is that still the case? This would be a major blocker to logging something like, say, Heart Rate Variability (HRV), where the range of values often spans only one or two integers and differences of 0.1 are therefore highly significant.

We want to support lots of different value types, like durations and scales, so floats will be available too.

Amazing - thank you!

This is essentially what I do with Everyday now - just integrating that would work, but customizable “yes/no/skip today” with option of increasing or decreasing a habit would be huge. I use it to remind myself of tons of work stuff but also “Did I make my wife feel loved,” “Did I get the damn cat litter,” “Did I remember to post something on the professional social media,” “Did I abstain from alcohol” … without those features this is a nice data viz but will always just be another tool in the arsenal.

Can’t wait for this! - seems to be my main hold back with the app so far. Tracking things like meditation and diet (like abdominal pain to learn correlations to diet; tied in with Cronometer).

And what about manual add ins for exercise? Being that I don’t always wear my Fitbit. Cheers!

Numerical values will greatly increase the usefulness of Exist for how I plan to use it. Can’t wait for this :)

I’m excited for this too. I need to be able to tag things I do and the amount of time I do them so I can see that time graphed out. ie if I play chess, draw, play piano I want to have an understanding of how much time I have done all of those things.

Hi! 2020 is ending, are there any updates?

You can see my last update on the status in the forum: https://forum.exist.io/t/where-are-we-at-with-manual-tracking/708

Just a thought… would it be difficult to allow the data attached to a custom tag be either numeric or text? So if I have a tag I might want to describe what caused me to tag it, but tie that to the tag, not just throw it in the day’s notes.

Also, can the numeric tags have optional ranges and meanings for each number associated with them, similar to the 1-9 for mood? So some might be set up as freeform numbers (e.g. “cups of coffee”) and others might have ranges (e.g. “depression” from 0 to 3, with 0 being “none” and 3 being “severe”).

Just my 2 cents: It would be extremely useful for me if I could input multiple “tags” per day and have insight into how they correlate over time. For example: Day 1: - coffee, 9 am - anxiety, 1 pm, (2) Day 2: - coffee, 8:30 am - anxiety, 1 pm, (1) - coffee, 3 pm - anxiety, 4 pm (4) So from that I could learn that is positively correlated with the feeling of anxiety

Manual tracking has launched! Be sure to install the latest version of Exist for iOS or Exist for Android to try out the new features. More details and lots of examples for what you might want to track are included in this announcement blog post.

This is really cool, I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time! One thing I noticed however that could be improved - is there any way you could add this feature to the desktop browser version of the app? I’d like to be able to enter manual tracking data from my PC, as well as from my phone. Thanks!

I also noticed that it’s impossible to unset a manual tracking value of the 1-9 scale type; once I set a value, all I can do is change it to any number from 1 to 9, and I can’t set it to blank again.

It’ll come to the web too sometime soon :) and yes, this scale behaviour is consistent with the existing scale for rating your mood.