The only app you will ever need is "Google Sheets".
I started using it ~3 years ago as a time-sheet to track my work, activities, sleep, mood etc. I tried to do what you did - see how X impacts my mood and look for trends. Here's some of my findings over the past three years in that regard:
Thanks Nicholas, I'll definitely give this a shot. So how did you go about tracking the effects of interventions? For example, how did you discover that gratitude was helpful or that carb-heavy lunches were impacting energy? Do you just try them one at a time and see how that affects things, or did you somehow perform an X/non-X comparison as I described in the original post?
This post might be useful for you . See the last paragraph where I linked to my daily trackers. I have some comments in them.
Let me know if you have any questions!
As step one in actually improving my life, I am embarking on a massive expedition for data, both about myself (e.g. triggers for moods, when I feel the most focused) and about the effects of certain interventions (e.g. meditation, taking short naps). However, I'm not quite sure what the best way is to go about this.
I've been using the iPhone apps iMoodJournal and Track Your Happiness for about a week for hourly check-ins, and they've worked fine, but they don't quite have the flexibility and breadth of functionality I'm looking for.
Ideally, I'd have something that would let me add check-in entries about my mood, focus/productivity, state of physical discomfort, or anything else I'd want to measure on a numbered scale. I'd also like to be able to enter in these check-ins things that I'd done in the previous hour and then see an analysis of how these activities/interventions affect me (e.g. how my state is different when I do X vs not-X not just at that moment, but in the hours after as well).
People who have done something like this: what was your approach? Is this much precision necessary? Does something like I describe exist?
My general question is this: what are some ideas for ways to systematically notice and track your internal state to find correlations between events/actions and your state?