Pink Edition
Morale-O-Meter - track your day
In both my yearly trend forecast and my rant against social networks I advocated for more valuable social networking applications. I'm sick of having to pretend to be a teenager to be "social". Luckily, a shift is forming and more and more social network initiatives can be used by everyone.
One of these "new social" applications is the Morale-O-Meter, a system that allows you to track how you are doing in terms of morale, overall health, sleep, alcohol and caffeine consumption.
This is my "Morale-O-Meter" for the past 5 days (note: I wasn't feeling well over the weekend, hence the drop in health and sleep)
This might seem silly to some, but this is actually a proven method to track well-being. Similar concepts is often trained and used in management seminars - and several companies around the world use day-by-day "mood points" to track company health.
The system is very simple to use, it is integrated into 43Folders' account system and you set each level every day.
You can then compare your day with how other people are doing, customize a graph to put on your site and get email reminders.
But, it is missing three things:
- You need to be able to define your own categories, but according to Buster McLeod, it "maybe coming someday". Just take my example. I have not had a drop of coffee for more than 3 years, so my caffeine level is always zero.
- Comparing your day with strangers is not nearly as valuable as being able to compare it to people like you (similar age, job type, workload etc.)
- Weekday-by-weekday comparisons. It is more relevant to compare Monday's to Monday's - instead of comparing it to the other days in a week. This way you can determine if a special day of the week is the cause of any discomfort or imbalance.
(Morale-O-Meter, via Information Aesthetics)
Published: Feb. 19, 2008
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Thomas Baekdal is a Writer, Interaction Designer, Change Advocate and Project Manager.