Tally counter app: what to count, resets and goals

A tally counter is about the simplest tool there is: press a button, the number goes up. The metal ones with a thumb lever have sat in the hands of door staff and bird surveyors for a very long time. A counter app on your phone does the same job, and a good one adds the things the metal clicker can’t: several counts at once, a history, and a number to aim for.

This post covers what people actually count, the one setting that matters most (whether a count resets), how goals fit in, and how the Counter skill in Shadowkit works on Android and iPhone.

What people count

Almost everything falls into four groups.

Things you do to your body. Push-ups, squats, laps of the pool, glasses of water, cups of coffee. You want today’s number, and you want it to start again tomorrow.

Progress through something. Pages read, rows knitted, kilometres ridden this month, boxes packed before a move. The total matters more than any one day.

People and things passing by. Guests through a door, cars at a junction, birds on a walk, stock on a shelf. You’re counting fast, often without looking at the screen, and you need to be able to take one back when you miscount.

Things you’d like to notice. How many times you checked your phone, said “um” in a talk, or bought a coffee out. The count itself is the point: seeing the number is what changes the behaviour.

Knowing which group you’re in tells you how to set the counter up.

Daily reset or running total?

This is the choice that makes a counter useful or useless.

A running total never resets by itself. It suits progress through something with an end: laps toward a distance, books read this year, boxes packed. You reset it by hand when you start over.

A resetting counter goes back to zero at the start of each day, week or month, and keeps what the last period reached. It suits anything where the question is “how many today?” or “how many this week?”.

Some examples:

• Cups of coffee: daily. Yesterday’s four cups have nothing to do with today.
• Pages read: weekly. A week smooths out the days you didn’t open the book.
• New people met, or meals out: monthly.
• Laps toward a swimming challenge, or guests at one event: never, and reset by hand afterwards.

If you find yourself resetting a counter by hand every morning, it should be a daily one. If you keep losing a total you wanted to keep, it should never reset.

The reason a reset matters is the history. A counter that closes each day and remembers it can tell you your average and your best day. A single number that only ever grows can’t.

Step size

Not everything goes up by one. Push-ups usually come in sets of ten, and water might be counted in millilitres. A step is how much one tap adds. Set it to the size of the thing you actually do, and one tap logs one set.

Goals: a number to reach

A goal turns “how many?” into “how many to go?”. Eight glasses a day, 100 push-ups a day, 150 pages a week, 20 books in the year.

Two things make a goal pleasant to live with:

• It should be “at least”. Reaching nine glasses when the goal was eight isn’t a failure, and the counter shouldn’t stop at the goal.
• It should match the reset. A daily counter wants a daily goal, and a running total wants one overall target.

If what you’re tracking is really yes-or-no on a schedule (“did I meditate today?”), a habit tracker fits better than a counter. A counter records how many, not whether. We wrote about that side in habit streaks that don’t punish a day off.

How Shadowkit’s Counter works

Shadowkit is ours. Counter is one of its skills, and it’s built around the ideas above.

Create a counter. It has a name, one of six colours, a step from 1 to 1,000, and a reset: Never, Daily, Weekly or Monthly. A summary line reads the setup back to you, for example “+10 per tap · Resets daily”.

Count. Each counter is a card with a minus and a plus. A count registers the moment your finger lands, and holding the button repeats it, slowly at first and then faster. Each count gives a light tick of haptic feedback. The minus takes one step back and stops at zero.

Count without looking. Every counter has a tap view: the number, large, and nothing else. The whole screen below the header is the plus, so you can count people through a door with your thumb while watching the door. One touch is one count, however long you hold it. A small minus sits in the corner for mistakes, and the screen stays on while the view is open.

Count from Home. Counter has its own page on Shadowkit’s Home: every counter as a tile with its own minus and plus, two to a row. Today, the first page, shows your first counter’s number at a glance. On Android there are home-screen widgets too, so you can count without opening the app at all.

Fix a number. Tap the value to set it directly, when you forgot to count for an hour and know the real figure. Reset now sets a counter back to zero by hand, with Undo for a few seconds afterwards.

Look back. A counter’s own screen shows the current period, your average, your best period and the total, with a bar chart of the last 14 days, 12 weeks or 12 months. A counter that never resets shows its past resets instead. When the day, week or month ends, the counter records the total and starts again at zero by itself. Weeks follow your phone’s regional setting for the first day of the week.

Set a goal. A goal is optional and can be any whole number up to 999,999. For a daily, weekly or monthly counter it applies to each period, and for a counter that never resets it’s one overall target. The card shows “40 / 100” with a bar and “60 to go today”. At the goal it shows a tick and “Goal reached”, and you can keep counting past it. With a goal, the counter’s screen also shows how many periods met it and how many did so in a row.

What it doesn’t do

Worth knowing before you choose it:

• Whole numbers only: no decimals and no negative values.
• It records how many in each period, not the time of each count.
• Past periods can’t be edited.
• There’s no export of a counter’s history.
• A counter stops at 999,999.

Limits

The free version holds 5 counters in a profile, and Shadowkit Pro raises that to 20. Goals and the tap view are free. If you count things for work and for yourself, each profile has its own counters.

Counting daily counters also earns gems, Shadowkit’s collectible rewards, which we explain in habit tracker rewards without the streak pressure.

It works anywhere

A counter is often used in exactly the places with no signal: a pool, a field, a stockroom, a venue’s back door. Shadowkit works fully offline, with no account and no ads. Your counts are stored on your phone and stay there.

Shadowkit is coming soon to iOS and Android. The FAQ has the short answers in the meantime.