mood

If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Steve Jobs

Background

I've been a heavy user of 1 Second Everyday, where I created a very personal video of the full year for the last 730 days. (Check out a public sample video here)

One thing I noticed is that I associate the mood and happiness when seeing the videos, however, I know that this will slowly fade away as time passes.

I wanted a way to track my overall happiness and excitement in my life, allowing me to monitor, analyze and react to it. As Steve Jobs said, if you notice a downwards trend, it might be time to apply some changes to your life.

How it works

It's a simple Telegram Bot that will send you a message 3 times a day:

One in the morning (I'd never reply to the bot before showering)
One after lunch
One when going to bed

You can always just text your bot a number, however, I know I'd forget it. That's why the bot sends you those reminders.

It then pulls up this really nice, optimized keyboard in Telegram, with a short description of what each number means.

If you forget to track a day, that's no big deal at all. The database is simple, it looks like this:

@_db.create_table :moods do
  primary_key :id
  DateTime :time
  Integer :value
end

I decided not to store the information about breakfast, lunch and dinner, as it would make time zones more complex, as I'm traveling quite a bit.

Future

Graphs

I want a nice visualization page & dashboard for this. Maybe even just send a weekly and monthly summary via Telegram?

Right now, just send /graph to your bot to get your historic mood as a simple graph.

Alerts

I want my bot to alert me when it detects a downwards trends. Similar to the stock trading approach, I was thinking of using the 7d average (7 days, 3 times a day => 21 data points). It's all relative, so if there is a downwards trends for 2 weeks, there probably is something bothering you

Integration into 1SE

I usually edit the 1SE videos slightly to have "subtitles" for some of the important life events. Additionally, I throw in the classic Every day of my life music.

Additionally, with that data, I want to overlay my happiness level somehow, probably in the form of a graph, a bar, or a wave. Not sure yet, but I got 11 months to figure that out.

How to use it

You'll have to setup a few things

Create a Telegram bot using @BotFather and get the API key, and message ID with you
Provide those values using TELEGRAM_TOKEN and TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID
- To get the TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID, send a message to your bot and then access the following URL in your browser https://api.telegram.org/bot[TELEGRAM_TOKEN]/getUpdates. You'll see a message, and within that, the Chat ID to use
And host it on any server, like Heroku, and use the Heroku scheduler feature to call rake morning, rake noon and rake evening
Make sure to enable the Heroku worker is enabled

Visualizing Data

Download the contents of the database's mood table into a CSV. It'll look like this:

"id","time","value"
1,"2018-02-11 17:34:53.235841",3
...

Okay great. Next, open a Ruby repl and run the following:

csv = CSV.read('/Users/ashfurrow/Desktop/moods.csv')
File.write('output.csv', csv.drop(1).map { |r| [[DateTime.parse(r[1]).to_time.strftime('%F %H:%M')], r[2]] }.map(&:to_csv).join(""))

I might eventually get fancier and filter out to just show mornings/lunchtime/evenings but it's a start.

Open output.csv in Numbers, ⌘A the table, and click the graph icon. You must use the scatter graph to get Numbers to use the dates as a horizontal axis.

ashfurrow / mood