Most of that is a reaction to the amount of desktop space I have now! 3840x2160 takes some filling… especially when you have a ‘workflow’ that uses 4 workspaces…
Usually I only had a basic (down the right side) monitoring setup - but then I thought it would be nice to know what time it was where the people I corresponded with were… and then to be able to chat about THEIR weather… and
You get the idea. Anything worth doing in the first place is likely to be worth overdoing! 
Syntax-wise, I believe the conky line should be written as follows:
${execi 60 yay -Qc | wc -l}
I don’t know if the output of that command meets your requirements, but the ${command} syntax is required to execute properly in conky, at least AFAIK.
Let me know if this works!
Barry
Edit: PS–Go Jackets!
If what is wanted is a count of upgrades ‘available’, then I think this would suit conky better:
${execi 600 yay -Qu 2>/dev/null | wc -l}
but you would have to surround it with ${if} and ${endif} to make much use of it I suspect.
Edit: This will also include AUR updates. Use --repo between the -Qu and the 2> error redirect for repo pkgs only, and -Qua for AUR pkgs only 
I had the ${ }, I just failed to include them when I put the command in the post here. I did some more searching online and I’m giving:
${execi 60 checkupdates | wc -l}
and try now. At this point I’m just waiting for there to actually be some updates, so I can see if the conky updates and if the commands manually in the terminal reflect as expected, etc. Kind of the opposite of this topic, so sorry again for getting off topic. Also, @bkaplan glad there’s at least one other GT rep around here. THWg!
I don’t post often, mainly lurk.
Is there an option in the package manager to turn off notifications? Personally I find it a lot easier to update in the terminal. First thing I do after booting is to fire up a terminal and update. I don’t bother with any package manager, mainly to keep packages to a minimum and it would just sit there totally unused.
The notifier is a separate package. You can just uninstall it if you don’t want notifications.
You can remove the package eos-update-notifier. If you are using kde, also remove packagekit-qt5 to disable the built-in notifications.
You can never please everybody 
I was pretty sure there had to be an easier way Of course, my way works too!
I would worry about that 60 though - that’s a LOT of times to check - I’d have thought that 600 was actually a bit low (every 10 minutes) - especially as the checkupdates takes a second or 2 every time…
This all looks to be working now, using:
${execi 60 checkupdates | wc -l}
as posted before. I think I will change the update time to be more spaced out for sure though, no reason it needs to be very minute, unless you are impatient like I am. Looking back, things might have been working before, and that command I’m using is in no way the only one that would work, it was probably just me being too impatient and not letting things update. Being in a VM might not help as well.
“too many updates”, and arch is not even on the testing branch…
OT
nick reminds me of the avatar I made on 2020-03-10, in another forum 
Too many updates? I average a few in the morning and a few in the evening. It’s not bad what so ever. I used to run Manjaro and I used to get 300+ updates at times. That was a problem because you would essentially download them all and when it started to install them, you end up with incomplete or corrupted files and had to restart your updating again where it left off. Sometimes the system completely crashed. No I am sorry, I think you methodology is much better and easier to maintain and it probably easier on servers in different area’s of the world where they maybe overloaded by traffic because of the heavy work loads I’m guessing. Your system has been working beautifully for me as I was a Manjaro fan for a little over 5 years I think you’re doing a better job all around , Thankyou.
Richard
Development goes always straight forward , its always keep on moving…thats why you have several stages of distributions. Like arch, suse tumbleweed and fedora raw goes mostly straight forward.
Fedora is cutting edge also but like ubuntu creates a base and release it after some cycle, and bit of pieces of software get updated so that lower the update speeed only on security… is just what you used to it… with arch you just look what its updates mostly… sometimes you can update regulary but if you uncertain of things and see linux kernel systemd of mesa / video updates you can always wait for 3 days longer. sometimes the pkgrel change from 1 to 2 or 3 just means that fixed some bugs not the package its self is new like pkgversion 1.0.1-1 tot 1.0.1-2 is a rebuild example as example gcc updated…but if you leanr the way of the arch then you never goes back to others 