With the pandemic, everything in our life has changed: work, play, study, social relations. And everything will still change. “DigitaLife” is a series of articles that will try to seize ideas and opportunities to see beyond.
After the end of phase 1, on May 4, the Italians are counting down, waiting for the moment when they can go out freely. But phase 2 is not a free all, on the contrary: the institutions are placing trust in the behavior of the population, hoping that everyone is responsible. Of course, we have all felt enclosed within four walls for too long: we are more likely to have nightmares, we move less, we suffer from anxiety more frequently. In an absolutely paradoxical situation, we feel we are not in control of our home. And, with the relaxation of restrictions, everyone will have to manage their own needs, making decisions to move, work and meet other people in an efficient and above all intelligent way.
There is no single or definitive recipe for becoming better and more responsible people, and it is not even a fault to want to be able to go out again with friends and family to have an aperitif in the center. But it is possible to challenge oneself and understand how to be satisfied, and to do so, a smartphone, a computer and an internet connection are enough.
To understand what goes and what doesn’t, you need to have data to compare to really understand if the feelings we have are founded, and above all if you can act to improve.
There are hundreds of ways to track habits and your life via smartphone, but it is important to start from the basics, and from something simple and at the same time complete, which can give concrete help to become more aware of yourself.
Usage time: RescueTime
The first step in understanding how we live is understanding how we use our time: to work, play, relax. The most comprehensive way is to do this using an activity tracking service – to date, RescueTime is the best option. Just install the app from the official website or from the stores and configure always-on tracking. RescueTime analyzes the use of all applications in the background and proposes a category and a productivity indicator for each (or for each website).
The first is very useful to understand, overall, how much time you spend doing what: you might be surprised to find, for example, that we use messaging or email apps more than entertainment ones. Each website is automatically categorized, but you can also change the category manually. This is very useful when there are apps or sites that play an unusual role in different contexts: for example, for some people the use of Facebook on a computer could be related to work, while on smartphones it could be for leisure. Or, YouTube could be an online entertainment or education platform. Categories affect productivity indicators, which can also be manually edited, and describe the impact of the app or site on overall productivity. on a scale from highly unproductive to highly productive. As with categories, productivity indicators also need to be periodically reviewed and adapted based on changing usage – YouTube, for example, could be highly unproductive in one period and extremely productive in another, and must therefore be taken into account.
RescueTime works optimally with all devices except with iOS and iPadOS, on which it is not able to record the use of individual applications due to limitations imposed by operating systems. In general, the effects of RescueTime can only be seen in retrospect, and never a priori: only after having recorded at least a couple of months of activity is it possible to view graphs, like the one in the image above, which help to understand if, by changing some habits, these produce effects on work or personal life.
It is obviously possible to configure the hours and working days and holidays, and then filter the trends and analyzes also according to this parameter. There will be days when your daily productivity score will be above 80, others when it will be below 40. Understanding what influenced this or that score is just what it takes to improve your habits.
RescueTime is available for free, but there is an annual plan of around $ 40 that allows you to have additional features such as categorizing individual tabs or sections of an app or integration with other services, such as Exist.io.
Overall data: Exist.io
If RescueTime analyzes the activity, Exist.io allows us to have a complete picture of our person, online and offline. It is a platform developed by a small Australian startup, but it is powerful and packed with features. The focus of Exist is to aggregate the largest number of tracking services in a single solution, allowing automatic correlations to be made based on the analyzed data.
Exist is able to integrate with dozens of services: iOS and Android for health data, RescueTime, Dark Sky for weather reports, GitHub for software development tracking, Strava and many others. The more services are connected, the greater the effectiveness.
The operation is very simple: you sign up, connect all the services through the account configuration page and wait up to 3 weeks for the platform to process all the data and cross them, using machine learning algorithms to analyze if they exist pattern between one trend and another.
The app must always be active (multitasking) on iOS in order to function and collect data from the Health app and the operating system, while on Android everything works automatically. The correlation analyzes take place with over 90 days of collected data.
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Some examples of correlations are visible in the image above, but it is really interesting to go back to the app every day and find that, perhaps, if you plan more events during the day, you are less productive or that, when it rains, you sleep less. .
Each correlation is calculated with a reliability score, from 1 to 5 stars, which can be answered with a series of automatic comments which, in effect, teach the platform how to behave with subsequent correlations. For example, a pattern showing a higher heart rate while running is useless, because it goes without saying, while a pattern showing that when you go to sleep later the next day’s productivity drops, is a very useful tip for acting on their habits.
Exist is a paid service that allows a trial period of 30 days, in which it is possible to understand if the number of connected services allows you to create a number and type of correlations that you really need. It costs around $ 60 a year .
Thoughts: Day One
After describing services that work automatically or semi-automatically, the last step consists in fixing one’s efforts, increasing awareness of the progress achieved, using an almost analogical tool: the diary.
There are those who write a diary on paper, those who do it on a simple sheet of text, but Day One is an app that does just that. It allows you to collect any type of content (text, photos, links, videos, maps, voice). You can create one or more journals and encrypt them using the built-in encryption service.
A good idea could be to use Day One as a place to reflect on the data analyzed by RescueTime and Exist.io (unfortunately Day One does not integrate with the latter yet). Taking 5, 10 or 20 minutes every day, perhaps in the evening, is a good way to reflect on what happened during the day and to fix everything that has been done, making it available for later reflection. The tag system for each note then allows you to track and categorize the various days according to a pre-established scheme. A Word file or Notes application on your phone or computer could do the same, but Day One has a focus on improving the journaling experience, of reflecting on yourself by writing a journal.
Each note is tagged where it is written and placed on the map. You don’t need to write a lot, just what might be useful later. It is good practice, once a month, to dedicate yourself to reread the notes by comparing them with the data produced by Exist.io or RescueTime to understand how thoughts change based on habits.
