| At a glance | |
|---|---|
| Minimum useful entry | A rating + a precise word |
| Better entry | Both, plus one line of what happened |
| How often | Once a day, roughly the same hour |
| Time budget | Under a minute |
| Stop if | It has become a score you are trying to beat |
Why the number alone is useless
A 3 out of 5 on Tuesday and a 3 on Friday look identical on a chart and may have nothing in common: one was flat and one was frantic. The score records intensity and throws away kind, and kind is what tells you what to do.
This is the practical version of the circumplex point: two axes, valence and arousal, and a single scale only captures one of them. Unpleasant and activated needs the opposite response to unpleasant and flat, and a one-to-five slider cannot tell you which you had.
So the minimum entry has two parts: how it was, and what it was.
What to record, in order of value
- The state, on whatever coarse scale you like. Five points is plenty; ten invites false precision.
- One specific word. Not "bad" — "outnumbered", "let down", "restless". Precision is the part that naming your emotions predicts benefit for, and it is also what makes a month of entries readable later.
- One line of context. What happened, or what you were about to do. This is the field that turns a chart into a cause.
Everything past those three is optional and most of it is drag: sleep hours, caffeine, steps, cycle, weather. Add a variable only when you have a specific question it answers, because each extra field is a reason to skip the whole entry on a bad day.
When to do it
Same time each day, and evening tends to work best for one boring reason: the day is over, so you are recording it rather than predicting it. Morning entries get overwritten by the afternoon.
More than once a day is for a specific investigation, not a habit. If you are trying to find out whether meetings or lunch or the commute is doing it, three timed entries for two weeks will answer that. Then go back to one.
Reading it back is the whole point
A month of entries you never re-read is a chore with a nice interface. The readback is where the value is, and it takes ten minutes.
What to look for, in this order:
- Repeats. The same word four times is a pattern, and the context lines next to it usually name the cause.
- Days you got wrong. Entries where the word and the score disagree are the interesting ones.
- What preceded the good ones. Easier to act on than what preceded the bad ones, and almost nobody looks.
What not to look for: a trend line. A month is too short, mood is noisy, and staring at a slope is how tracking turns into the thing in the next section.
Where tracking starts working against you
Three failure modes, and the first is the common one.
When it becomes a score. The moment you notice you would rather log a 4 than a 2, the tracker has stopped measuring and started grading. A streak makes this worse, and it is worth saying plainly: a number that measures you is one more thing to perform.
When it feeds circling. Checking in on your own state repeatedly is close to what overthinking does, and for some people a tracker is simply a licensed way to do it. The test is the same one: did any new information arrive?
When it replaces doing something. Recording that you feel terrible is not an intervention. It is a note. If the entry is the only thing that happens, the tracker is a diary of a problem rather than a step out of it.
If two of those three describe you, stop for a fortnight. Nothing is lost and the answer is usually visible from outside.
How oléyoga does the check-in
Five states, then fourteen words inside the one you picked, then a line for why. That is the whole entry and it is deliberately the three fields above and nothing else: no sleep field, no caffeine field, no slider from one to ten.
The words re-rank on what you have chosen before, so the vocabulary narrows towards yours over a few weeks, and there is a search box for everything the fourteen leave out.
Then the part that separates it from a tracker: it ends in a practice, not a chart. Pick overwhelmed and it offers a specific breathing exercise; pick something flat and it offers a different one. The weights come from the therapeutic effects recorded in the app's own pranayama sources, which is why breathing and meditation are one tap from the check-in.
That is also the honest answer to the third failure mode above. The entry is not the end of the flow, so recording a bad day does not become the only thing that happens on it.
There is a monthly calendar to read back, and no trend line, for the reason in the section above.
Quick questions
How long before a mood tracker shows me anything?
Two to four weeks before patterns are readable, which is the same horizon most people quit at. One month of honest entries beats three of padded ones.
Paper or app?
Either. Paper is better for the context line, an app is better at being there at 11pm. What matters is that the entry is short enough to survive a bad day.
Should I track when I feel fine?
Yes, and it is the part people skip. A record with only bad days looks like a bad life and cannot show you what preceded a good one.
Is there evidence this actually works?
Some, with real caveats about who it helps and who it does not. Does mood tracking work has the full picture.
What if I cannot find the right word?
Use the coordinates instead: pleasant or unpleasant, activated or flat. The list of emotions explains why ambiguous states are the normal case rather than a failure.
oléyoga records a word and a reason, and then offers something to do about it.
