Skip to main content

How To Count Your Day

I have been making an attempt to record my day. I'm doing this for a number of reasons. I want to know how my moods change through the day, when I'm happy or not, when I'm feeling motivated, and when I'm being productive.

To facilitate this, I have a spreadsheet on Google Docs called "Daily Me" and I've built two sheets. One tracks daily and one tracks hourly. This is what I'm tracking.

Daily:
  • When I wake up
  • Weight
  • How many of my morning exercises did I do?
  • How many of the things I want to do every day did I do? This includes morning pages, sketching, picking up my guitar, reading, and writing.
  • When I go to sleep
Hourly:
  • Mood
  • What am I doing right now?
  • 1-10 scales on how happy, depressed, energetic, and motivated I feel at the moment
  • "Productive" which I mark yes or no. I consider being "productive" doing whatever it is I feel I should be doing right then. This is the thing I try to keep in the green and use everything else to improve.
You might think this could get disruptive. I don't have to do it hourly, so that is only a maximum. I use KAlarm, and your OS has or can have another app for reminders. Every hour it launches a Spreadsheet Form in a new window to let me enter things and get back to whatever I'm doing.

I use this for other daily things. It asks me every day if I've done my exercises, tells me when to check my e-mail (not so I remember to, but so I don't check it too often), and other things.

Overall, I find this is helpful. I like being kept honest, even if its just with myself. I pay more attention to if I'm doing what I should be doing at any given moment, but I don't have to put too much into it and get distracted from those very things. Later, I can look back and find patterns. Even without looking into it deeply, filling it out and thinking about what's going on and how its affecting my day to day helps me improve my understanding of myself and how to do more with every day of my life.
Labels:

Comments

Peter Marks said…
How do you record when you went to sleep?
2:57 AM
Anonymous said…
For internally keeping track of mood, I use this (reminds me every 10 mins). For recording sleeping patterns, I use a pretty smart Android app that uses the accelerometer to detect your sleep times (if the phone is not moved for, say, more than 2 hrs - the you must be sleeping).
4:59 AM
Calvin Spealman said…
@Peter I fall asleep quickly enough and count being in bed as restful, so I enter it as when I got to bed. I add a half hour, for example, if I spent some time reading or talk with the wife.

@srid every 10 minutes seems a bit frequent, but I'll keep using KAlarm because its only one of many reminders.
8:08 AM
Michael Rivera said…
Hi Calvin, I liked your post. I'm working on a similar problem.
5:25 PM
Dimitris Leventeas said…
Great post Calvin!

I have started tackling this problem using my current from 22/1. It is very good to have some input about what other people do in similar situations.

My first attempt was using KOrganizer . I tried to synchronize it with Google Docs using Akonadi but it didn't help a lot. I wasted too much time on the computer while I need to have access to that with the computer turned off.

KAlarm is useful to remind me some things like call someone, reply to an email etc... Little things that are popping without any prior notice and have to be scheduled immediately.

Kmail has a really useful feature. Filters and folders. Using filters I have all the mails from mailing list to seperate folders without "acting on new mail". I use another folder for all mails that imply further action to do. This is the default folder of kmail.

I ported the schedule to a real table with dates (numbers 1-32 with one blank row). I use a real calendar where I write a review of the day and this to do in the next days in the margins of the corresponding day.

Your idea of keeping track of your mood each hour on the computer is useful. A little side comment reviewing what you did during that time would be useful too. A positive side-effect: Reminds you to take a break.

Keeping track of the time you sleep is useful too. Sleep too late usually means procrastination. Wake up too late usually is the side-effect. Working is an exception.

Could you provide more details about how do you keep track of your day?
Talk is cheap, show me the code.
2:49 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...
4 comments
Read more