Her name is Ariel and she is my ex-girlfriend.
Since we’re talking about people, I’ll take this opportunity to introduce a person who played an important role in my life. What matters is that, if I spent that day with friends, that evening, I’ll click the “friends” icon and say, “today was a good day.” Such top activity, say that - and I’ll be cheesy here - at a day’s end, friends are what stay in my mind. That’s 17.11% when compared to the grand total of 1338 activities I’ve added across my 1031 check-ins. This activity, used to describe a fun day spent with friends, pops up 229 times in the dataset. “Friends” (and no, I’m not referring to the TV show) is the number one activity. My activities and their frequency count, including mean and median. For example, one of my custom activities is “Pokémon!” (including the exclamation mark) and “baking.”įigure 3. It also allows you to add a custom activity to this existing list. After choosing one, the app asks what I did today and shows a predefined list of activities like “drinking,” “friends,” and “shopping” to choose from. Every day, at a set time, it sends me a notification asking how I am doing, and I answer by clicking one of the five faces ranging from somber to ecstatic. The five to ten seconds I need each night to track my mood became my daily meditation my time to recap the day’s moments, be genuine with myself, and ask, “how am I feeling?” But it developed into more than that (which I realized when I moved it to my phone’s home screen and bought the premium version).
It was fun, trendy, and a perfect addition to my ever-growing collection of time sinks. It started as you might expect: I browsed the app store, downloaded it, and tried it. I’ve been using a mood tracking app for over 1000 days. Using data to better understand what I did and how I felt