Ways to track personal habits and identify patterns

This year, I’m trying to keep better track of my life. That includes tallying how much I exercise, how often I use my phone and how well I sleep.

To do all of that, I’ve turned to a trend called “quantified self,” which is essentially using technology to monitor many daily activities. Not surprisingly, I’m relying on a bunch of apps for this.

Perhaps the simplest quantified-self app is Instant, which is $3 (Rs 202) on iOS and free on Android. Instant requires little personal input because it largely runs in the background, tapping into a phone’s systems and sensors to log how many times you unlock your device, how many minutes you use it, the geographic locations you’ve been to, how much time you spend travelling, how many steps you’ve taken and how much walking or running you’ve done.

The app’s home page shows a summary of daily activity and, with a few taps, users can see the history of each item, like fitness activity. The app can also display this history in graph form, making it easier to spot habits.

On Android, Instant can show which apps you have been spending time on. The app also integrates with the Android Wear smartwatch to display habit patterns on its watch face. To get access to all of these features, users do have to pay a couple of dollars.

Moves is a similar passive tracking app, although it logs only travel, exercise time and locations. It’s visually attractive, displaying users’ actions as a sort of graphical chain that evolves as you move throughout the day. Moves, which is easy to use, is free on iOS and Android.

If you’re looking for more detailed data of your daily habits, check out Reporter. This app also runs in the background, logging where you have been, your exercise levels and so on. If you have a newer iPhone model, the app can also track how many stairs you’ve climbed.

Its main perk is its randomly timed surveys, which pop up throughout the day. They prompt you to answer questions about how many coffees you’ve had and who you are with, among others. Typing in answers may seem cumbersome, but the app uses clever autocomplete suggestions to speed up the process. You can select how many surveys you get each day and add questions of your own to the list. The survey data sits within the app, and it’s up to the user what to do with it — whether to merely browse through or to assess patterns. The app shows your past activity in a minimalist interface.

If you are interested in more deeply assessing your habits over time, you can export your data and analyse it in a spreadsheet. If you want to see how your coffee intake correlates with your mood, then finding out this data is a good start. Reporter, which is only on iOS, costs $4 (Rs 270).

To improve sleep quality, I’m using Sleep Cycle (free on iOS and $1 or Rs 67 for Android) to find out how long I sleep and to wake me at a certain time to hopefully improve my mood.

To use Sleep Cycle, put your phone on your bed before sleeping. The app monitors your phone’s sensors to detect if you are lying still, indicating deep sleep, or moving around, indicating shallow sleep. The app uses this information to wake you gently with an alarm during a shallow part of your sleep cycle, which can help you avoid that awful “dragged awake” feeling a regular alarm clock can elicit.

Looking through your log of sleep patterns and at what you did on a particular day (using data from another life-tracking app, for example) can help you understand what factors may improve your sleep.

Sleep Cycle on an iOS device also works via the phone’s microphone, if you prefer not to place the device on your bed. If you pay to upgrade the app (for $2 (Rs 135) a month or $5 (Rs 338) for a year), you can make notes in the app about what may influence your sleep, like your caffeine intake or mood.

The caveat to these efforts is that these quantified-self apps lack a major ingredient in changing daily habits after they are measured: willpower. That must come from you.