Daylio

Originally Posted 8/30/23

image of the daylio app logo, which is a green square with a smiley face smiling on top of it

This is another post I originally made on Cohost (similar to my yt-dlp post), but thought it would be good to post it here as well. I'll basically just copy and paste everything over.

The Post:

I was listening to the most recent episode of Cortex (episode 145) and was super delighted to hear Grey bring up Daylio! I've been using Daylio for years now and it's honestly one of my favorite apps. I'll talk a little more about it here in case anyone else is interested:

What is Daylio?

Daylio is a journal-ing app that will also give you statistics based on the information you provide it. I find it really interesting to go back and look at how a month has been, or how something has been affecting my mood. I'm going to go into more detail below, but I do have the paid version, and I forget what's in the base vs paid version of the app.

How does it work?

Each day Daylio will send you a reminder that defaults to 8 PM I believe (though, I might've just set it years ago and forgotten about it). You can change it to a time that suits you. It then sends a notification at that time asking you how your day is. You rate it on a scale that goes "Rad, Good, meh, bad, awful" (I think you can change these but not 100% sure). You then choose what you've been up to based on a list of activities that you can edit. It uses these activities for the data tracking. You can then write about what's happened during the day, and upload some photos. When I started this, I sort of forced myself to write something, anything, for each day. Even if it was just "I stayed home all day and played video games". As time has gone on, I've tended to write more for each day.

The Data

Like I mentioned, it uses whatever activities you've selected for the data tracking. It will then tell you how many times you've done that activity, how it impacts your current day, how it impacts the next day, what other activities go with it, etc. You can also have the data focus on how you rated a day - so it could tell you that on 100% of the days you went camping, you rated the day as good (or, that's a stat for me). It can also tell you which day of the week you're most likely to have that activity or rate the day a certain way.

Month View

Day Rating Correlations

Therapy Activity Correlations

Wrap up

I really like the app, and would encourage people to try it. I think it's been overall a positive experience having to reflect about my day and write about it. It's also really interesting to have that sort of data available whenever.