Examined Human

Examined Human is a local-first Obsidian plugin for planning, recording, and reviewing a life through one connected body of information.

You write ordinary Markdown forms. Examined Human validates them, asks for confirmation before importing them, and turns the resulting history into a calendar and a set of dashboards for time, commitments, money, food, exercise, and milestones.

The connecting idea is an engagement: anything you meaningfully engage with, such as a person, relationship, course, project, practice, responsibility, hobby, or long-term goal. Sessions, transactions, milestones, and plans can all point to the same engagement.

Examined Human runs on desktop and mobile. Your notes and database remain in your vault. It does not require an account, server, Python installation, or cloud service.

Current release: 0.9.6 Requires Obsidian 1.8.7 or newer

What you can do with it

The usual rhythm is:

1. Plan a day, week, or budget in Markdown.
2. Record what actually happened in a Daily Form.
3. Preview and validate the form.
4. Confirm the import.
5. Review the result in the calendar and dashboards.
6. Improve your canonical lists of engagements, foods, exercises, accounts, and aliases as your life changes.

Daily history acts like a receipt: after a Daily Form for today or a past date has been finalized, it cannot be silently rewritten. Future Daily Forms can be reviewed but cannot be imported. Weekly plans and budgets can be updated by importing the same period again.

If you are new, the shortest useful path is: create and test an empty database, copy the explained Daily Form into your journal workflow, seed one engagement through its Admin Events section, and import that form. You can add foods, accounts, exercises, Weekly plans, and budgets only when you need them.

Installation

Install from Community plugins

When Examined Human is available in the Obsidian Community plugins directory:

1. Open Settings → Community plugins.
2. Select Browse.
3. Search for Examined Human.
4. Install the plugin and enable it.

Install manually

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the same Examined Human release.
2. In your vault, create .obsidian/plugins/examined-human/.
3. Copy the three downloaded files into that folder.
4. Reload Obsidian.
5. Open Settings → Community plugins and enable Examined Human.

Do not copy data.json from another vault. It contains settings that belong to that vault.

First-time setup: from installation to a working plugin

Complete these steps in order. The first six establish a real, usable installation. Step 7 is an optional disposable practice run.

1. Choose or create your database

Open Settings → Community plugins → Examined Human.

In Database path, enter the location of the database relative to the root of your vault. For example:

• EH.db puts it at the vault root.
• data/EH.db puts it inside a data folder.

Do not enter a Windows drive path, an absolute path, or a path outside the vault.

Then choose one route:

• New user: enter the path you want and select Create Schema v1 database.
• Existing user: enter the vault-relative path of your existing compatible .db file.

Select Test connection. Continue only after Obsidian reports that the Examined Human database is OK.

If you are connecting an older pre-1.0 database and Settings offers an upgrade, make an independent copy first, preview the upgrade, read the confirmation carefully, and then decide whether to proceed.

2. Set the Journal folder

In the same settings page, set Journal folder to the vault-relative folder that contains your Daily Notes. Examined Human searches its subfolders too, so a value such as Journal can cover folders like Journal/2026/daily.

Leave the field blank only if you intentionally want the vault root to be the Journal folder. The recommended Daily Note filename is YYYY-MM-DD.md.

3. Choose how forms are discovered

The recommended Form discovery option is Only unimported EH Form notes. It lets you explicitly tell Examined Human which notes to inspect and avoids scanning unrelated Markdown.

The alternative, Every note in Journal folder, also considers unmarked notes in the Journal folder. It can be useful during migration, but it is broader and may be slower in a large vault.

4. Add EH form to note metadata

For the recommended discovery mode, put this YAML frontmatter at the very top of every note that contains a form:

---
EH form: unimported
---

EH form: true is also accepted. Matching is case-insensitive.

The marker tells the plugin that the note is ready to be discovered:

• unimported or true: inspect this note.
• imported: its importable Daily and Weekly Forms are complete.
• false: deliberately ignore this note.

After all eligible Daily Forms (past or today) and Weekly Forms in a note have been imported, Examined Human normally changes the marker to imported. Budget imports and mutable planning updates do not change it because those plans remain editable.

5. Put the forms into your note workflow

The repository includes both explained and minimal versions:

• Daily Form with explanations
• Weekly Form with explanations
• Budget Form with explanations
• Minimal Daily Form
• Minimal Weekly Form
• Minimal Budget Form

Start with the explained forms. Use the minimal forms after the entry formats feel familiar.

Copy the forms into your Obsidian template system or paste them into notes manually. If you do not use the Templater community plugin, replace expressions such as <% tp.file.title %> with the real ISO date yourself.

Keep these structural elements unchanged:

• the #### EH Daily Form, #### EH Weekly Form, or #### EH Budget Form heading;
• the date fields inside the form;
• the section headings and required ENTRIES: markers;
• the closing #### END marker.

A note may contain one form of each kind. The form's internal dates determine what it represents; the filename alone does not.

The current Daily templates intentionally omit sleep_hours, calories, protein_g, studied, worked, and exercised. Those values are calculated during assessment and import, displayed in the report, and stored in the database without requiring duplicate manual entries.

6. Import the minimum personal vocabulary

An empty database knows the allowed general types, but it does not know the names from your life. Before logging sessions, create at least one engagement. Add the other kinds of records only when you intend to use their sections:

• an engagement is required for sessions, commitments, milestones, transactions, and budget targets;
• an account is required for transactions;
• a food is required for meal rows;
• an exercise is required for structured Exercise Details.

The quickest first seed is a Daily Form dated yesterday or earlier. Leave its ordinary sections blank and put your creation commands under Admin Events → ENTRIES:. For example, replacing these names and values with real ones:

ENGAGEMENT_CREATE | Learning Examined Human | practice | active |
ACCOUNT_CREATE | Cash | cash | USD |
EXERCISE_CREATE | Walking | cardio
FOOD_CREATE | Oats | grain | 389 | 16.9 | 66.3 | 6.9 | 0.01 | 10.6 | 0 | plain oats | [oatmeal]

If you only want to begin tracking time, the engagement row is enough. Do not invent nutrition figures for real foods; use values you trust.

Open the seed note, run Examined Human: Import Daily Form from Active File, review the validation preview, and confirm the import. Creation rows are staged evidence until this import succeeds.

The full Daily validator stages Admin Events in a disposable copy before resolving the rest of the form. This means the same form may create an engagement, food, account, exercise, type, or alias and then use it in its sessions, meals, transactions, or exercise details. The real database is still changed only after confirmation.

You can later use the Command Center to prepare new records and aliases through forms instead of typing commands manually.

7. Optional: learn in a temporary database

After your minimum seed import succeeds, you may want to explore immediately without filling your real history with experiments.

1. Write down your real Database path exactly.
2. Change it to a clearly temporary vault-relative path, such as sandbox/EH-demo.db.
3. Select Create Schema v1 database, then Test connection.
4. Copy a Daily Form and use a past date that is only for the demo.
5. Repeat the minimum seed with obviously fictional names, such as Demo Project, Demo Cash, Demo Meal, and Demo Exercise.
6. Add several dummy sessions, a meal, a transaction, exercise sets, and a milestone.
7. Import the form and open every dashboard described below.
8. Try a Weekly Form and a Budget Form, then reimport them after changing something so you can see how editable plans behave.
9. When finished, restore the original Database path and select Test connection before returning to real notes.

The demo database is independent. Nothing seeded in your real database is automatically copied into it. You may keep the demo for later practice or delete it after switching back to the real database and verifying the connection.

8. Check the important preferences

Before regular use, review these settings:

• Nutrition evaluation: set meal calories, daily calories, and minimum protein to match the rules you actually want. A value of zero disables that automatic rule.
• Backup retention: 0 keeps every Examined Human backup; a positive whole number keeps that many newest backups.
• Default dashboard period: controls the initial date range in analytical dashboards.
• Valuation: choose the display label and reference asset class only if you want converted net-worth views.
• Calendar: choose the initial hour, desktop day width, mobile day width, and session colors.
• Form cleanup after import: the Daily, Weekly, and Budget switches are independent and disabled by default. When enabled, only the exact form block that was validated is removed after its database import succeeds; surrounding note text and other forms remain.

On Obsidian 1.13 and later, Examined Human preferences are organized into searchable General, Nutrition, Financial, Styling, and Exercise pages. Older supported Obsidian versions render the same preferences as a single categorized page.

How information moves from a note into the plugin

Examined Human deliberately separates preparation from import:

1. Discover: the plugin finds a note through its EH form marker or the broader Journal-folder mode.
2. Stage: you write entries directly, or a dashboard/Command Center adds proposed rows to an unimported Daily Form.
3. Review the note: the Markdown remains the readable source you can inspect and correct.
4. Preview and validate: the plugin checks dates, formats, names, aliases, and references and shows what it found.
5. Confirm: only an explicit confirmation applies the validated change.
6. Review the result: refresh and inspect the relevant dashboard.

Dashboard buttons that say Stage do not finish an import. They add reviewable text to a chosen current or future Daily Form. The database changes only when the appropriate form import later succeeds.

Daily Forms

A Daily Form can contain observed metrics, a general daily note, sessions, meals, transactions, valuation rates, exercise details, milestones, Stoicism notes, and Admin Events.

Session rows use either interval | engagement | notes for a typeless session or interval | type | engagement | notes when an explicit session type is needed. The four-field form may also leave the type field blank. Typeless sessions inherit their engagement type for calendar color. If the form contains Exercise Details, exactly one session must use type exercise; all of that form's exercises and sets attach to that session.

• For today, opening or refreshing the Calendar projects the eligible Daily Form's Sessions for display without finalizing the day. You may also validate and finalize today's complete form.
• For a future date, the assessment can be reviewed, but canonical Daily import is refused until that date arrives. Future Calendar sessions come only from an imported Weekly Form.
• For a past date, importing creates the canonical historical record after validation and confirmation.
• Once a Daily Form is finalized, changed facts are rejected rather than silently replacing the receipt.

Calories and protein are calculated from every structured food row, including snacks, and are displayed to two decimal places. The plugin also derives studied, worked, and exercised from session/engagement types: study or course counts as study, work counts as work, and exercise or fitness plus structured exercise rows count as exercise. Sleep is calculated from matching sleep sessions during a configurable 24-hour assessment window, defaulting to 21:00 on the previous date through 21:00 on the assessed date; a session type, engagement type, or canonical engagement name of sleep qualifies. Split an overnight sleep into one session ending at 23:59 and another beginning at 00:00 on the next date.

If a same-form Admin Event creates a food or food alias used by Meals, use the full Daily import. The separate Meals-only action cannot persist the new food definition by itself and will instead tell you to import the Daily Form first.

Use Examined Human: Import Daily Form from Active File while the note is open, or work from Daily Assessment.

Weekly Forms

A Weekly Form covers exactly seven days. It holds a direction, commitments, and a planning grid. Import it with Examined Human: Import Weekly Form from Active File or from Weekly Assessment.

Importing records the weekly plan, and its current or future sessions appear directly in the Calendar dashboard even when no Daily Notes have been created yet. The latest imported version of that week is the one the calendar uses.

Sync week is a separate, optional action that can copy current and future planned sessions into empty Daily Form Sessions sections. Use it only when you want those rows materialized in the notes; existing occupied sections are not silently overwritten.

Importing the same starting date again updates that week. Planned sessions remain intentions; completed time comes from historical Daily Forms.

Budget Forms

A Budget Form describes targets and expected movements for a non-overlapping period of at least four days. Import it with Examined Human: Import Budget Form from Active File or from the Financial Dashboard.

Negative targets represent expected spending or liabilities; positive targets represent expected income or assets. Expected movements are plans only. They do not create transactions, reminders, or notifications.

Importing the same start and end dates again updates that budget.

Command Center and other staging actions

The Command Center manages your canonical foods, engagements, exercises, accounts, aliases, and valuation rates. Its actions are intentionally staged into a selected unimported Daily Form so you can read the exact change before importing it.

The Financial Dashboard uses the same pattern for opening balances and reconciliations: it stages a normal, clearly marked transaction in a Daily Form. The Daily Form import is the step that applies it.

What to do with forms after importing

After an import succeeds, you have three valid choices:

• Keep the note. This is recommended when you want a permanent, human-readable record of what happened, what you planned, and what was submitted to the plugin.
• Remove only the imported form automatically. Enable the separate Daily, Weekly, or Budget cleanup switch in Settings. After a confirmed database import, Examined Human removes the exact validated form block while preserving surrounding journal text and other forms.
• Delete or edit the source manually. Imported information remains in the database, so the form is not required for ordinary dashboard display.

Remove source material only after confirming that the import succeeded and the information appears correctly. Deleting an unimported form also discards staged changes that have not yet been applied. If automatic cleanup notices that the form changed after validation or cannot identify one exact block, it safely leaves the note untouched; the completed database import is not falsely reported as failed.

Dashboard guide

Open dashboards from the Obsidian command palette. Obsidian prefixes their commands with Examined Human:.

Calendar dashboard

The calendar shows sessions on a horizontally scrollable sequence of days and a vertical 24-hour timeline. Past days use canonical imported sessions. Future days use only sessions stored from the latest imported Weekly Form, so future Daily Notes cannot accidentally change the plan. Today combines the eligible Daily Form (or today's canonical import) with the Weekly Form: Daily intervals win conflicts, while non-overlapping Weekly sessions remain visible. Click a session for its exact time, duration, type, notes, exercise details, milestones, and any data-quality warning.

Use it to answer: When did I spend time, and what did I spend it on?

Daily Assessment

Daily Assessment lists discovered forms and imported days, newest first. It previews and validates Daily Forms, imports past dates or today, refuses future dates, and displays the same report used by the active-file import command. That report includes manual and inferred metrics, the session calendar, foods with nutrient totals, transactions with unit totals and valued net flow, exercise sets, and notes. Hard validation errors hide the report and expose the available resolution actions first.

When a form refers to an unknown engagement, food, exercise, or account, Daily Assessment can help stage the missing canonical record or alias into that unimported note. Revalidate after staging.

Use it to answer: Is this day ready to import, and what exactly happened that day?

Weekly Assessment

Weekly Assessment shows the week's direction, commitments, planned sessions, actual time by engagement, and planned-versus-actual differences. For current and future weeks, it can preview and sync the planning grid into empty Daily Form Sessions sections.

Use it to answer: What did I intend to do this week, and where did the week actually go?

Engagement Dashboard

The Engagement Dashboard brings everything about one engagement together. Search by its canonical name or an alias, choose a date range, and review its status, dates, session time, activity trend, session types, recent sessions, lifetime milestones, linked financial totals, and transaction ledger.

Use it to answer: What is the complete story of this project, relationship, practice, course, or goal?

Financial Dashboard

The Financial Dashboard shows balances as of a selected date, account and net-worth history, period inflow and outflow, financial activity by engagement, recent transactions, active budget targets, and expected movements. You can inspect one account or all accounts and use native units or your configured valuation view when rates are available.

It can also stage an opening balance or reconciliation into a Daily Form. A period's net flow is activity during that period; it is not the same thing as an account balance.

Use it to answer: What do my accounts show, how did money move, and how does that compare with the plan?

Nutrition Dashboard

The Nutrition Dashboard shows calorie and protein trends, meal and food breakdowns, diet adherence, data coverage, and leisure-meal debt for assessed days. Snacks contribute to daily calories but do not count directly as one of the three main meal opportunities.

Use it to answer: What did I eat, how complete is the evidence, and am I following the rules I configured?

Exercise Dashboard

The Exercise Dashboard shows training days, workout time, detail coverage, exercise volume, performance maxima, distance, measured duration, muscle exposure, and recent workouts. Ordinary exercise sessions still appear even when you did not record structured sets.

Use it to answer: How consistently am I training, and what does the recorded performance show?

Command Center

The Command Center is the maintenance workspace for engagements, foods, exercises, accounts, aliases, valuation rates, and batches of Admin Events. Search existing records, prepare changes, choose an unimported Daily Form, review the proposed rows, and stage them. Raw Admin Events can also maintain the type vocabularies with SESSION_TYPE_ADD, SESSION_TYPE_REMOVE, ENGAGEMENT_TYPE_ADD, and ENGAGEMENT_TYPE_REMOVE; removal deactivates a type for new input without deleting historical references.

Use it to answer: What canonical names does my system know, and what correction should I stage next?

A practical daily and weekly routine

1. Create today's Daily Form with EH form: unimported in its frontmatter.
2. Add planned sessions if useful; opening or refreshing the Calendar synchronizes today's session plan automatically.
3. During or after the day, fill in what actually happened.
4. Validate the complete form and import it either today or later. Future-dated Daily Forms remain review-only.
5. Keep the form as part of the readable journal, remove it manually, or enable the matching post-import cleanup switch.
6. At the start of a week, create and import a Weekly Form.
7. During the week, update and reimport the plan when necessary.
8. At review time, compare Weekly Assessment with the canonical Daily Forms.
9. Create or update a Budget Form whenever you begin a new planning period.

Use Examined Human: Reload EH.db and refresh all dashboards whenever you want every open view to reread the selected database immediately.

Troubleshooting the first setup

The plugin does not appear

For a manual installation, confirm that .obsidian/plugins/examined-human/ contains main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css directly—not inside another nested folder. Reload Obsidian and check that the plugin is enabled under Community plugins.

Test connection fails

Confirm that the Database path ends in .db, is relative to the vault root, and points to the database you intended. For a new installation, create the database before testing it. For an existing database, make sure the file is actually inside this vault.

A form is not discovered

Check all four boundaries:

1. the note has EH form: unimported or EH form: true at the top;
2. the selected discovery mode includes that note;
3. the form begins with the exact EH Form heading and contains a valid date;
4. the form ends with #### END.

If you chose Journal-folder discovery, also verify the configured Journal folder. If you chose the recommended marker-based mode, the form can be anywhere in the vault.

Import reports an unknown name

Sessions and plans need a known engagement; transactions also need a known account; meals need a known food; structured exercise rows need a known exercise. Correct a misspelling, use an existing alias, or stage the missing canonical record through Daily Assessment or Command Center, then revalidate.

A full Daily Form may create the missing record or alias under Admin Events and use it elsewhere in that same form. If the Daily report accepts it but the separate Meals panel says Import Daily first, use the main Daily import so the canonical food and meal are committed together.

A typeless session is rejected or missing from the Calendar

Use three fields for an ordinary session: interval | engagement | notes. Use four fields only when you need an explicit session type: interval | type | engagement | notes. Typeless sessions inherit the engagement type for calendar color. The older blank-type form, interval | | engagement | notes, is also accepted. Weekly planning-grid cells use semicolons and still reserve their first position for an optional type: ; engagement ; notes.

A future Daily Form will not import

That is expected. A Daily Form can be finalized only for today or a past date. Future Calendar sessions must come from an imported Weekly Form; wait until the Daily Form's date before importing it as canonical fact.

The database reports unfinished external changes

Close or finish the write in the other SQLite application, then use Examined Human: Reload EH.db and refresh all dashboards. Do not replace the database file while another application still has unfinished changes.

Data ownership and safety

• Your notes and database remain in your vault.
• Examined Human does not upload your data or fetch market prices.
• Imports and staged changes require review and confirmation.
• Finalized writes create backups according to your retention setting.
• The plugin refuses unsafe paths and avoids overwriting another program's unfinished database changes.
• Vault synchronization is your choice and is not provided by the plugin.

Keep independent vault backups, especially before connecting or upgrading an existing database.

Current boundaries

Examined Human does not provide reminders, notifications, automatic exchange rates, market-price fetching, recurring transactions, medical records, recurrence rules, calendar synchronization, or automatic repair of ambiguous old data. Sessions that cross midnight must be split across two dates.

These limits keep the system focused on deliberate recording, reviewable plans, and evidence you control.

For developers

Build instructions, validation commands, repository structure, database and import architecture, safety invariants, and release guidance are in DEVELOPMENT.md. User-visible release history is in CHANGELOG.md.

Fork attribution and license

This project began as a fork of seonggoos/obsidian-schedule-calendar. Its Obsidian view scaffolding and overlap-layout foundation were adapted for a different data source and interaction model.

MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 seonggoos and Copyright (c) 2026 OssAhmad.