Creating a 'countdown bar' for days left

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

Like many people, im often overwhelmed by the amount of subscriptions I have. For some bizarre reason, I have somehow decided to get a variety of study related courses or subscriptions that I am worried about not taking advantage of, so I’d like to create a visual reminder of how much time is left in each.

What I’d like is a progress bar whose lengths on days I can define that automatically shortens each day until the allotted time has passed. In a way, it’s an automatic reverse-progress-tracker for days? I guess.

Things I have tried

I googled progress tracking, but most of the stuff is manual and requires a degree in Dataview proficiency I simply don’t have.

2

Wouldn’t this be similar to counting down to that given date? Like counting down for a birthday or similar?

I do believe there has been multiple queries related to that in the forums.

So what kind of data/dates do you have? How many are we talking about, and would you like to see all on the same page, or just the one on the page you’re currently looking on?

3

I don’t know about creating it in Obsidian, but I have a prototype tool for this in Google Sheets, and I love it. It helps me keep on top of assignments in school as well.

screenshot_2024-12-29_10-19-32
screenshot_2024-12-29_10-19-321920×439 67.8 KB

A super short summary of how I do it:

  • Conditional formatting can use formulas, based on other cells, to colour status.
  • To count longer than a week, repeating unicode squares using a formula like: REPT("🟦", $C31-TODAY()).
    • Maybe Dataview has some expression that could repeat a character like that, based on a date count.
  • The week countdown just compares the due date to the date in row 2. Depending on the number the formula outputs a number. And that number causes some conditional formatting to make the coloured blocks.
  • I sort column C to put everything in graphical order by date.

(But honestly, for things like subscriptions, I put those as events in my calendar, and just add a bunch of alarms beforehand. I also use You Need A Budget to track finances, where you can make monthly payments towards a known yearly cost, for example. I don’t believe everything should be done in a note-taking app.)

1 Like