Task Genius

Habit Tracking

Habit Tracking is a powerful feature of Task Genius designed to help you easily track and visualize your habit formation process using Obsidian's daily notes feature.

By adding simple metadata (Frontmatter) to your daily notes, Task Genius can automatically index and display your habit completion status.

Available since 8.5.0

Getting Started

1. Define Your Habits

First, you need to tell Task Genius which habits you want to track.

  1. Open Task Genius settings.
  2. Navigate to the "Habit" settings tab.
  3. Click Add new habit.

You need to configure the following basic information for each habit:

  • Name: The display name of the habit, e.g., "Meditation", "Drink Water", "Read".
  • Icon: Choose a Lucide icon to represent your habit by entering its ID (e.g., brain, glass-water, book-open).
  • ID: A unique identifier for the habit, usually auto-generated, used for internal reference.

Next, you need to select the appropriate Type based on how the habit is tracked and configure the corresponding Property and Completion Condition.

Habit Types and Configuration

Task Genius supports multiple habit types to accommodate different tracking needs:

Daily Habit

This is the simplest type, used to record whether a habit was completed on a given day.

  • Type: Select daily.
  • Property: Define a Metadata Key used to mark this habit in the daily note's Frontmatter. For example, you could use meditation-done or journaling_complete. This key name should be unique.
  • Completion Condition:
    • exists (default): Considered complete as long as the Property exists in the Frontmatter (regardless of its value).
    • equals: The value of the Property in the Frontmatter must be strictly equal to the specified Value to be considered complete (e.g., Property is exercise, Value is "completed").
    • Other conditions (greaterThan, lessThan, contains) are less common for daily habits but can be configured if needed.

Example (Daily Habit - Meditation):

  • Name: Meditation
  • Icon: brain
  • Type: daily
  • Property (Metadata Key): meditation
  • Completion Condition: exists (default)
Count Habit

Used for tracking goals that require reaching a certain quantity, such as drinking 8 glasses of water or doing 50 push-ups daily.

  • Type: Select count.
  • Property: Define a Metadata Key used to record the count, e.g., water_cups or pushups.
  • Completion Condition:
    • Typically use greaterThan or equals.
    • greaterThan: Considered complete when the value of the Property in the Frontmatter is greater than the specified Value.
    • equals: Considered complete when the value of the Property in the Frontmatter is equal to the specified Value.
  • Min / Max: (Optional) Define the expected minimum or maximum count value.
  • Count Unit: (Optional) Add a unit to the count, e.g., "cups", "times", "minutes".
  • Notice: (Optional) A notification message triggered when a certain count value is reached.

Example (Count Habit - Drink Water):

  • Name: Drink Water
  • Icon: glass-water
  • Type: count
  • Property (Metadata Key): water_intake
  • Completion Condition: greaterThan, Value: 7 (goal is 8 or more glasses)
  • Count Unit: cups
Scheduled Habit

Used for tracking habits that involve multiple sub-items or specific scheduled events, such as a multi-step morning routine.

  • Type: Select scheduled.
  • Events: Define the list of sub-events included in the habit, each with a Name and Details.
  • Properties Map: Define a unique Metadata Key for each event to individually mark its completion in the Frontmatter. For example, for a "Morning Routine", events might be "Wake up", "Drink water", "Stretch", with corresponding keys morning_getup, morning_water, morning_stretch.

Example (Scheduled Habit - Morning Routine):

  • Name: Morning Routine
  • Icon: sunrise
  • Type: scheduled
  • Events:
    • { name: "Wake up", details: "Wake up on time" }
    • { name: "Drink water", details: "Drink a glass of warm water" }
    • { name: "Stretch", details: "Do 5 minutes of stretching" }
  • Properties Map:
    • Wake up: morning_getup
    • Drink water: morning_water
    • Stretch: morning_stretch
    • Note: The overall "completion" status of a scheduled habit might depend on its specific implementation in the view, but tracking is based on individual event metadata keys.
Mapping Habit

Used to map a numerical value or state from your daily note to a specific habit label, such as recording mood or energy level.

  • Type: Select mapping.
  • Property: Define a Metadata Key used to record the original value, e.g., mood_rating or energy_level.
  • Mapping: Define a mapping relationship from numerical values to text labels. For example:
    • 1: "Very Low"
    • 2: "Low"
    • 3: "Neutral"
    • 4: "Energetic"
    • 5: "Excellent"
  • Completion Condition: Usually based on whether the Property value exists (exists) or meets a specific condition (e.g., greaterThan 3 indicates a good state).

Example (Mapping Habit - Mood Log):

  • Name: Mood Log
  • Icon: smile
  • Type: mapping
  • Property (Metadata Key): mood
  • Mapping:
    • 1: "😞"
    • 2: "😟"
    • 3: "😐"
    • 4: "🙂"
    • 5: "😃"
  • Completion Condition: exists (Tracking is considered complete as long as it's recorded)

2. Track Habits in Your Daily Notes

Once you have defined your habits and configured their corresponding Property (Metadata Key), you can start recording them in the Frontmatter of your daily notes (or other periodic notes, depending on your Obsidian setup).

Task Genius will automatically scan the Frontmatter of these notes and determine the completion status of your habits based on the Property and Completion Condition you set.

Example Frontmatter:

Assume today is 2023-10-27, and the corresponding daily note file is 2023-10-27.md. Based on the habit examples defined above, your Frontmatter might look like this:

---
date: 2023-10-27
# Daily Habit (Meditation) - Existence implies completion
meditation: true
# Count Habit (Drink Water) - Record the specific value
water_intake: 9
# Scheduled Habit (Morning Routine) - Mark completed sub-events
morning_getup: done
morning_water: ✅
morning_stretch: skipped
# Mapping Habit (Mood) - Record the rating
mood: 4
---
Today's journal content...

Explanation:

  • meditation: true: Because the meditation key exists, the "Meditation" habit is marked as complete. The value could be true, done, yes, or even a number; completion is triggered by the key's presence.
  • water_intake: 9: Because 9 is greater than the completion condition value of 7 we set, the "Drink Water" habit is marked as complete. Task Genius will record the value 9.
  • morning_getup: done, morning_water: ✅: The keys corresponding to these sub-events of the morning routine exist, so they will be recorded. morning_stretch: skipped will also be recorded, but how it's displayed depends on the view.
  • mood: 4: The "Mood Log" habit is considered complete for tracking purposes because the mood key exists. Task Genius records the value 4, which might be displayed as "🙂" in the view based on the mapping.

Important Notes:

  • Ensure your Frontmatter syntax is correct.
  • The Property (Metadata Key) used must exactly match the one defined in your Task Genius habit settings.
  • Task Genius relies on Obsidian's metadata cache (metadataCache). If you find data isn't updating, try restarting Obsidian or triggering a data rescan in the Task Genius settings.

3. View Your Habit Progress

Task Genius provides a dedicated Habit View to visualize your habit data. You can usually access it in Task Genius Views.

Reward

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