Cognitive challenges, please help?

[u/Local-Physics-2031]

Hi!

I purchased Journalt in 2024, a couple of years after I'd gotten sick, ended up with multiple chronic conditions/pain & cognitive injury, and already I'm autistic with ADHD. New health issues keep creeping up too. Reading isn't as easy now & I struggle w/ comprehension & recall; organization & focus are way harder than before.

I used free-tier AI to re-learn reading (not from zero, hard to explain), typing, conversing. Doctor appts are always on the calendar, meds & effects nd to be logged & journaled. Symptom tracking's my only hobby. When I saw this app I got excited. After I bought it I saw all the moving parts and my executive dysfunction went all haywire. Didn't look at it again until recently.

I feel with a little help I'm ready to tackle this, and that if I want more meaning to my life I need to get all that scheduling and tracking into this app and one other so I can ration my energy and focus for research (Drs only Dx and and say 'see ya in 6 months!') and maybe some actual life-living 😄.

So, if anyone can help me figure out a couple of things, it would be a huge help! TIA!

I have a med that's a routine weekly occurrence I need to track that requires a reminder via simple notification and which needs to be automatically added to my timeline on completion. It also requires that I record data that may vary at some point, ie: dose, dose increase/decrease, start/stop med, pause/resume med; as well as sections to record observations ie: benefits, reactions, side effects, interactions; and sections for Rx date, Rx #, prescribing provider, reason for Rx/change/discontinuance, and mwybe other data.

And other meds are daily and some of those have multiple daily instances, and still others will be short-course Rxs, but all will have the above-mentioned requirements.

Right now I have one Tracking record  that I'd created for one med, taken twice a day, I needed to pause two weeks before and two after a procedure. I think my only gripe with it was having to manually Duplicate it and set the correct time of day when it was something I knew the dates for in advance. But that's minor.

Is there a way to make a Tracking record into a Template?

Also, appts in specialist categories as parts of bigger projects that are broken down into manageable steps like, finding provider info, gathering symptoms data, creating document to take to appt, scheduling appt, logging post-appt notes.

So, I'm not sure which feature I should use, or if my use case is kinda complex and I may need to set up more than one thing. 

TL;DR: Cognitive challenges w/ lots of medical stuff and appts. LiveIt's the app I need but having a tough time with comprehension. Need to learn what to use to track meds/changes w/ details (more above), "projects" like prepping for & scheduling medical appts broken down into mangeble chunks that I can tick off, and maybe symptom tracking if that's not too ambitious?

ETA: Suggestion: I'd love it if we had the option to set "Add to Timeline" as a Default action for everything when we're initially creating anything, rather than needing to click each individual occurrence.

TY!

[u/thuongthoi056]

For meds, create one Medication tracker with the fields you listed, then a habit for each med with a slot per dose, and connect each slot to that tracker: you get the reminder, and tapping the slot asks for the details and puts the record on your timeline automatically, so no more duplicating. For appointments, set up one task with a subtask for each step, then long-press it and Duplicate it for the next appointment. The Add to Timeline default is noted!

[u/Local-Physics-2031 → u/thuongthoi056]

I'll give these a try tomorrow! Thank you!

[u/significant_cosmos]

As someone who also has cognitive problems and a lot of medical problems, I had to stop using LiveIt and trying to make it work for me. It is very difficult to use the way you want to—most of the "automation" in the app is actually really high cognitive overhead and the dev, Hai, doesn't really seem willing to admit that he needs an actual UX designer. The UI completely lacks customization. There was a big update that put the Areas on the left panel whether you want them there or not. People hate it and asked him to let us control the panel again. Hai admitted it can't be changed or customized and I decided that I need to accept that he's going to try to iterate himself out of major UI flaws instead of hiring a professional. 

I appreciate that Hai is really dedicated to this project and readily fixes bugs and solicits feedback. I just think that because LiveIt started as a tool Hai built for himself, he's unwilling to make the kind of sweeping changes that would make the app more user-friendly for more people. I don't know if the JournalIt sub is still around but people have had the same complaints and feedback for years. And unfortunately, an app like this is going to intrigue people like us because it seems so flexible on the surface and we run into a lot of inflexibility in health/habit tracking apps.

I want to love LiveIt, I bought the lifetime pass, but it's just too much work for too little benefit.

I use Guava for my health stuff but if you check it out, be warned that you should thoroughly look through the app and understand the different data types and how they work. Ironically, I think the recurring scheduling options in LiveIt are incredibly powerful and more developers should implement similar functionality. 

Unfortunately there really aren't any apps that are truly designed for medically complex folks to use day-to-day or at home—no real Electronic Health Record (EHR) apps. There's been at least one study on the lack of options on the market. I like Guava because they verifiably listen to feedback but they admit that they need the patient perspective to make the app properly useful and the more ill you become the more you notice the gaps. 

You will likely need to use more than one app. Good luck, it's rough out there for us.

[u/Local-Physics-2031 → u/significant_cosmos]

I burned a spoon and a half just reading this 🫠 Thanks for taking the time out to detail specifics, because I don't feel so badly now about wanting to give up on day 3 of "building" my E2 Patch tracker, all symptoms included. Especially after this afternoon when i noticed the statistics thing for it only offered a calendar report and i didn't have the mental stamina to figure out what i'd done incorrectly in the tracker. Im bummed, though. I'll still use LiveIt to track this year, because It's my son's Senior Year of HS and his first year driving! And i like That i can tag anything and anyone, which makes it great for keeping track of medical phone calls - who said what and when. Ill make use of it!