FEBRUARY 6, 2025
Author @Samuel
Mood Tracking on Life Planner
Tracking your mood and emotions can be a powerful tool for improving your mental health. I also think there is value in having empirical data on your mood. The data can be very helpful in finding your triggers, stimuli, or even the source of energy drain. The ability to pinpoint the source of your emotional fluctuations can help us live more intentional lives. For example, the ability to pinpoint regular sources of negative or positive emotions can help address your feelings better, whether it's a location, an individual, or just particular days or seasons.
Fun Fact
Seasonal depression, also called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), is a type of depression triggered by seasonal changes such as winter and fall. Associated feelings and effects include sadness, lack of energy, loss of interest in usual activities, oversleeping, and weight gain.
I spent a significant chunk of my life in Eldoret, Kenya. The average temperature in the Kenyan town is 20º Celsius high and 10º Celsius low. Eldoret town's weather is cold, regardless of whether it's raining or cloudy. Even when the sun is up, it's cold enough to catch a cold. This weather was very depressing. As such, I don't look back at my time there fondly.
Deciding to Integrate the Feature
Life Planner is a robust app with plenty of features. Lots of features ensure our users are happy because they get more value for their dollar. The downside of integrating lots of features into any piece of software is that these features will require maintenance. The development process can easily get bogged down by the sheer amount of work required to maintain all these features. Due to this fact, we try to strike a balance with Life Planner, finding the sweet spot between a concise, laser-focused app and a super app-type feature set. We are basically trying to support a ton of features but have the features decoupled enough to make it easy to maintain the app as well as to not overload the user with nested navigation graphs and ten different ways to achieve the same goals.
Understandably, about a year of internal appeals, customer requests, and team deliberations continued before the first line of code was written. This usually happens when we find the perfect slot to add the feature. In this case, it just so happened that we expanded the previous "Journaling" feature into a fully-fledged "Wellness Module". The wellness module at the time hosted the "original journaling features" as well as (on Android) the "wellness trivia" feature.
The wellness module proved to be the perfect spot for the mood-tracking features for a few reasons:
- Mood tracking fit the overall wellness theme, a core mental health feature on Life Planner.
- The sub-menu limit on each module has been four; therefore, moving the wellness module from two (Journal & Trivia) entries to three (Journaling, Trivia, and Mood Tracker) was just perfect and within the four-menu item limit.
Mood Tracking V1 on iOS 2.1.3
The next step was building the initial concept of the feature. I always prefer laying out the concept of the feature before sending the draft to Life Planner's extremely talented designer @Philip Orono. I don't think of these concept implementations as "drafts," as I often release them to production with a design and usually a second redesign to follow in later updates. After a design has been done, replication on all supported platforms follows. Regarding Life Planner mood tracking features, the initial rollout would be bundled into an existing 2.1.3 update that was in active development.
I settled on a few baseline (minimal) features for the V1 rollout:
- Ability to log a mood, with a limited spectrum (Extremely Sad, Sad, Slightly Sad, Neutral, Slightly Happy, Very Happy, Extremely Happy)
- Mood logging history dashboard, with support for today's logs, today's logs timeline chart, and mood calendar, limited to the current month
- Today's mood history on the main app dashboard
The feature also released with a system-scheduled mood logging reminder/notification, with no support for user customization.
Mood Tracking - Logging UI
The mood logging screen is a simple slider that a user can scroll to select the mood they want to log.
This version is notably missing mood tagging support for metadata such as Activity, Location, or Person names.
Mood Tracking History Dashboard
Mood history has support in two parts of the app: a dedicated single-screen scrollable dashboard with today's mood log history, a time series chart, and a current month-only calendar.
Mood Tracking V2: Life Planner iOS 2.1.4 Update
I should take the time to dive deep into what I believe would be a valuable update to this feature in the upcoming update of Life Planner for iOS.
While reflecting on the V1 rollout and from user feedback, there are already glaring issues and missing capabilities.
At the top of the list of enhancements for Mood Tracking in Life Planner:
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Support for mood logging entry tagging as an optional feature.
The tagging capabilities should cover activities (reading, watching a movie, working out, walking, etc.) and locations (at the mall, at home, at work...).
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A feature-rich mood-tracking calendar that allows viewing entries from dates in other months and years beyond the current date. The ability to click on a date and view a time series of habit log entries.
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Support for custom mood-tracking (logging) reminders.
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Support for period-based mood-tracking reminders (every 10 minutes, every day at 11:00 PM, every hour).
I will conduct a more in-depth evaluation of what will work best as enhancements to this feature, but this is at the top of my wishlist (also based on user feedback).
Join Me on This Journey
An important first step is to download Life Planner if you haven't already and try out the mood-tracking feature in "Wellness." Download Life Planner App here
I'm always checking my Twitter, so leave feedback, tag me, or send me a DM on X: @SamProgramiz
You can also send me an email at my personal email: samuelowino43@gmail.com or my work email: samuelowino@thelifeplanner.co.
If none of the above options work for you, you can still leave a review on Life Planner's App Store Page
If, for some reason, you can't reach me on any of these platforms, contact my co-founder: leonard_nyaoke@thelifeplanner.co
Last Update: FEBRUARY 6, 2025