[HN Gopher] Show HN: Then - Understand how you spend your time a...
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Show HN: Then - Understand how you spend your time and what
influences your mood
Author : alexpotrivaev
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-06-22 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pupishi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pupishi.com)
| bredren wrote:
| Is there a way to compile this so it can also run on Intel-based
| Macs, via the MacOS App Store?
|
| This is the second app I've tried to download MacOs App Store
| that requires an M1.
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| Then is actually only available on iPhones and iPads.
|
| 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.
| mduncs wrote:
| Are there specific things that differentiate this app from other
| mood journals like Daylio?
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| Opposite to many of mood journals (including Daylio), Then is
| about more than just mood.
|
| 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.
| throwaway803453 wrote:
| After optimizing my diet, sleep, and exercise, I learned my mood
| and energy levels were always primarily related to two things:
|
| 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.
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| Then is an activity and mood diary that helps you analyze how you
| spend your time and how things you do influence your emotions.
| You can easily track what you do, how much time it takes, and how
| it makes you feel.
|
| 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...
| calrueb wrote:
| I love the concept of these sort of apps. I am a data nerd, and
| would really enjoy having a birds eye view of how I spend my
| time. The problem for me is building a habit of consistent data
| entry. If I miss a few days it is hard to remember what I was
| doing and backfill old data.
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| Being data nerds as well, we were scratching our own itch with
| Then.
|
| 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.)
| reidjs wrote:
| Tangentially related. I have fairly unorganized folder with a ton
| of markdown journal entries, notes, observations, shopping lists,
| etc. I would like to go through organizing, archiving, and
| editing these entries.
|
| 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?
| eric-hu wrote:
| I use a VSCode plugin called Dendron for this. It provides some
| commands to operate over notes, like renaming, for instance.
|
| https://www.dendron.so/
| codazoda wrote:
| I've never gone back and logged old notes but I did start doing
| something that's worked well for me...
|
| 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.
| reidjs wrote:
| How do you handle multi-line thoughts?
|
| Can your system do hyperlinking and filtering by one or more
| tags?
| blackkat wrote:
| Just went through this process myself with a similar rag-tag
| collection of snippets. I used the zettlekasten process and a
| plug-in for visual studio code to help with the organization of
| said information.
|
| Have a look and see if it works for you.
| reidjs wrote:
| I'm looking into Foam, thanks for putting a name to the
| process.
| npunt wrote:
| One thing I learned after tracking key life criteria for a few
| years is it's easy to be hyper-focused on tracking at the
| detriment of living your life. If you sample more than a few
| times a day, you'll wind up 'living to track' instead of
| 'tracking to live' because of the constant diligence it requires.
| Also if you ever track pain, you wind up bringing attention to
| it, which you might not want to do too much.
|
| 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.
| pgt wrote:
| +1 on Sleep. No matter what I'm doing - if I'm well rested,
| then 99% of the time, I'll have a great time doing it.
| mg wrote:
| I am doing this with VIM and a text file:
|
| 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Impressive and this is awesome, but you've only covered one
| aspect of it: logging. Logging is of no use (perhaps except the
| conciousness it brings in the process of writing things down)
| unless you have a way to query, analyze and gain meaningful
| insights from all this data. Have you done that? Thanks for
| camping out at the summit of HN's peak :-)
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| oh wow, that's a lot of entries!
| [deleted]
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| If you're willing to share: have you discovered any unexpected
| causal links yet?
| mg wrote:
| Hard to say.
|
| 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.
| Blahah wrote:
| Super interesting question! Some combination of NLP and
| classical time series stats will probably show lots of
| interesting things.
|
| 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?
| mg wrote:
| Have you seen the link I posted? I think it answers most
| questions and is a good starting point for a discussion.
| starmftronajoll wrote:
| Wow! Thank you for sharing this. The simplicity (yet
| versatility) of your 8 rules appeals to me.
| [deleted]
| blowski wrote:
| I find these tools to be the ultimate form of unhelpful navel-
| gazing. If you already feel good, what's the point? If you're
| feeling low, you become obsessed and frustrated.
|
| 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.
| valbaca wrote:
| > I find a combination of open-ended journaling, prayer and
| meditation, and talking with people
|
| I think that's precisely what these kind of tools help with:
| discovering what has the most impact on your feelings.
| blowski wrote:
| I guess it varies from person to person. For me, these tools
| are counter-productive - what's really important bubbles up
| during that time, while these tools mask it.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I'm in a relationship with someone who can't quite put
| together that certain activities and certain moods are
| correlated. They've put a bit more structure in their life
| to preclude the randomness that they usually pursue and
| it's helpful.
|
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I do this with Nextcloud's health utility. It's fully open source
| and compatible with anything that has a web browser, not just
| your iDevices.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| I was going to test it and give feedback, but I'd have to give
| Apple money. Consider using FOSS next time.
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| The app is actually free. Only the advanced features are
| paywalled.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| Is there a web app?
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| No, iOS only for now. Depending on the usage, we might
| expand to Android and Web
| deregulateMed wrote:
| Like I said, it's bad to give Apple money.
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| I like seeing these types of apps, but they're not for me. I'm a
| pen and notecard type of person. Perhaps I'll create a notecard
| implementation of this :) Best of luck. I'm curious to see how it
| will evolve.
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| Thanks!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tracedddd wrote:
| It looks like "settings" is misspelled in your first screenshot
| in the App Store (bottom left)
| alexpotrivaev wrote:
| thanks so much for flagging!
| ultrarunner wrote:
| Wanted to check this out but it requires iOS 14. I'm on 13 in my
| primary phone until 14 gets jailbroken or iOS gets a proper
| equalizer. If there are no actual dependencies could you consider
| rebuilding for 13+?
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(page generated 2021-06-22 23:01 UTC)