Sami Inkinen, triathalete, self-quantifier, and founder of Trulia, measures his mood on a five point scale every morning, within five minutes of waking up. This method fascinates me. I do something similar (though I use only a three point scale). Sami has found that this quick and easy measurement reliably correlates with his athletic performance, suggesting that it indeed measures something significant about his overall well being in the day ahead.
Read Sami’s full post here: What the first 2 minutes after waking up can tell you about the day ahead?
Sami, if you see this, great work in getting such a large dataset, which must have taken a great deal of focus so early in the morning. One thing I’m curious about is that there are many different nodes on your graph. As each of your scales is a five item one, it would seem there could only be 25 possible combinations yet the graph has a much higher number than this. Were you actually recording values on a more finely-tuned basis?
It’s a fascinating study, thanks for sharing it.
I think the amt of data points is because although mood is measured on a 5-pt scale, physical performance maybe measured on a scale of 1 – 10 based on his workout. I know he uses a heart rate monitor/power meter so he might be deriving a performance score from those tools.