Show HN: Then – Understand how you spend your time and what influences your mood
pupishi.com
pupishi.com
1) Working hard but nothing to show for it. If I get stuck too long on a problem, I now work on a simpler problem or take a break. Otherwise I just wind-up depressed and tired.
2) Interactions with people. I am aware of when interactions with co-workers, family members, etc. turn from energizing to energy draining and then either end the interaction or ask them to avoid this topic in the future.
Meh ;)
I doubt all of them will always haunt. I could probably see what you mean in some instances. In many others absolutely no. Just ending it is fine. Like talking to HR. They're usually more than useless and just take up your time for no good reason. If you can end a conversation early or satisfy whatever they make you do to the letter and the letter only, go for it, don't ever think about it ever again.
I've had literally one HR person in my career so far that seemed to actually care about people and tried to make things better. And one other that was at least good at her job and did what she promised though the circumstances we needed to work together for weren't the nicest experience (for both of us, coz we had to lay off a bunch of people)
[Edited: TMI]
Unfortunately, both of them are kind of unavoidable if you work for someone else.
Personally I only found one clear trend after tracking for years: my energy levels determined my mood, but not visa-versa. If I was fatigued, my mood plummeted. A very useful insight for future behavior, especially rest/sleep, and one I had to learn through tracking to really it get to stick.
I still track things every day but I do so as a form of accountability to myself. I use it to get perspective on my day and week, to identify and address trends early that I might otherwise dismiss, etc. Useful for behavior change, not data analysis.
Overall, it's a good practice like a form of journaling, but one you want to do somewhat infrequently - I wouldn't track any one thing more than 3x/day, and for everything you should be able to fill it in later (usually the eve) if you are too busy living life.
Re the tracking too much, there is the old joke about a bicycle odometer that bings whenever you pass a beautiful site so you don’t miss it in your obsession with velocity.
https://www.gibney.org/a_syntax_for_self-tracking
9625 entries and counting.
I was planning to start writing the software to analyze causations when I have 10k entries. But I recently started already. It turned out to become a new project that feels a lot like a javascript based jupyter alternative running in the browser.
My tool so far does not output p values. At the moment, it visualizes possible cause/effect relationships in kind of a dot cloud. It shifts all effects in time relative to the possible cause. So an effect would look like a dent in the graph on the right side of the origin.
Some cause/effect pairs look interesting. But I want to gather more data and implement appropriate statistical tests before I publish something.
It is an interesting question, which statistical tests to apply to this kind of open log format. If anybody here has ideas about this, I would be very interested in hearing them.
What's the density over time of the entries? I.e. How many entries per day? And are you consistently recording the same kinds of events and information about them? How many different kinds of events?
Personally - and I know this isn’t for everyone - I find a combination of open-ended journaling, prayer and meditation, and talking with people I love and trust to be much more effective at achieving balance in life.
I think that's precisely what these kind of tools help with: discovering what has the most impact on your feelings.
A little more tracking in other areas -- exercise and nutrition -- has been helpful as well. We're all self-employed, working from home, so knowing when you're being orderly versus free versus random is a good lens to employ.
The flip side of randomness is the lack of a feeling of accomplishment and of feeling of working towards a goal. But I do think these things are largely societal values imposed on us. When I realise I don't care about spending my time wisely it bothers me a lot less.
I manage to be plenty successful in work too. Not super much but at a level I'm comfortable with.
Has anyone done something like that before? How did you do it in a sane way? Do you just start at the end and work forwards? Do you have some kind of #tagging system and then you applied something like elasticsearch or sqlite to filter them?
Have a look and see if it works for you.
I log, "stray thoughts". I put these in a physical notebook but Google Keep or Apple Notes works just as well. Anything goes and everything goes in the same place.
At the beginning of my day, I "translate" my hastily written thoughts into more complete notes in a flat text file. Each thought is written on a single line in a way that I could read and understand it out of context.
I use hash tags to categorize and to link other ideas (by line number).
I also created a biblio.txt file that has URLs, names, book titles, and other references in it. I use curly braces to link a note to a reference.
Example:
Pencils are longer lasting than pens. #324 #327 #writing {26}
The real magic happens when I use my text editors search feature to research all my previous thoughts about something in my flat text file.
Can your system do hyperlinking and filtering by one or more tags?
Whether you choose to focus on just one activity, like time spent working, or record everything you do during the day, detailed insights will help you identify patterns and get a breakdown of positive and negative influences in your daily life. Its goal is to offer a simple, clean and calming experience to help you be more mindful about your time and emotions.
You can download it on AppStore here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/then-activity-mood-diary/id156...
We tried to add a few things to make it a part of our routine, like push notifications and homescreen widget.
But what worked the best for me personally was seeing the value (i.e insights on my activities): after that it got easier to remember to track.
One other thing was focusing only on things that mattered. At first I was trying to track every single activity every day, but then realized that things like showering didn’t really give much insight. So now I primarily focus on activities that are energy draining or which I want to be conscious about (focused work, meetings, side projects, walking, sport etc.)
re: Thankless hole For a minority yes perhaps. Its really the best long-term investment that you hope pays off in both seeing them flourish into beautiful adults who will either do something beneficial for humanity and ideally take care of your old broke ass when you are too old and frail.
But yeah, it's almost a necessity to become better at time management and improving executive function as a parent. If you can't, you lose out in so many areas. It really compounds. I don't know of any sources of good advice on how to accomplish that though; I think families are complex so the 'one size fits all' advice that's more common will tend to cater towards people who have far more control over their environment.
As for the thankless rabbit hole, I was referring to the struggle to meet the standards of others with more time and resources to optimize their lives better. My kids are, overall, one of the most thankful aspects of my life. They're well worth the loss of optimization.
I run a problem validation platform called needgap, There's a problem titled 'Getting things done at individual level '[1] which you might be interested in.
There have been different solutions to the problem, But I don't think there's one which has mood tracking as part of task management. It would be interesting to see if mood tracker as part of task manager turns out to be better for productivity.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/30-getting-things-done-at-indiv...
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.afewthings&...
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/delightful-gratitude-journal/i...
This is the second app I've tried to download MacOs App Store that requires an M1.
Macbooks with M1 can run those due to M1 magic, but to enable it on Intel-based Macs, the app actually has to be built for the MacOS unfortunately.
First, it’s focused on understanding your emotions through your activities (i.e. there is no way to track mood without capturing what you did) and showing you correlations between them.
Second, it also allows you to capture time spent on each activity and helps you reflect on it, irrespective of the mood (we actually have some users who use Then as a time tracker alternative).
In a way, you can think of it as a tool that marries time trackers and mood journals.