Learnings from my 2020 in Pixels via Moodee

Towards the end of 2019, I saw someone (I can’t remember who, sorry! But thanks for the idea!) post their “Year in Pixel” and thought it would be quite an interesting exercise to look back and have a little bit of (data-driven) retrospection of how a year has been.

I decided to do the same for 2020 and promised myself to review on the 31st (today) and look at any learnings.

And lots of learnings and surprises there were.

My new year post. Oh, 2020 did bring it. lol.

Oh dear, how 2020 panned out hey! What a year it has been! Not just for myself, but for everyone!! Jeez!!!

So, I am going to share my year in pixels here and gather some trends or learnings.

But first — what is Moodee?

It’s a very simple app that asks you at a pre-configured time everyday to ask you to plot how was your day. It’s a simple 5-scale input, really — ranging from awful to awesome. No other inputs, no verbatim, no context — just a simple scale for the feeling / mood for the day.

There’s no automatic analysis or reports after as well — nor a way to correlate any other data to qualitatively provide any other context given any day (but I guess, that is the point — looking at trends — though I might research and try other apps and see if adding a simple text as well can help me correlate end of next year)

So, what does looking at my 2020 year in pixels showed me?

My 2020, in Pixels.

1. It’s really a year of meh, but I feel quite lucky. Obviously, it is not lost on me that to some significant others, it would have been a wall of blues and dark blues as this pandemic has affected us diversely in many, many ways.
2. Took me a while to find the work/life balance as working from home became the norm. It’s quite interesting to see (we started WFH / lockdowns in March) with the year how I still see lots of good days in April and May, then started to morph into days of meh before I see patches of good days again. I wrote about my learnings after months of working from home back in September where I learned I needed to structure my day to make the most of it — without going crazy with endless online meetings.
3. Patches of blue on the first quarter of the year were all attributed to all the uncertainty. Interestingly, the bulk of the blue clusters were back in Q1 this year. Remember when we called COVID the novel virus then? We were scared but unsure.
4. My worst day of the year was back in June after weeks of meh. I had to check and recall if this was the moment of hard lockdown, but we were well into easing the restrictions by then (at least in Sydney, we were easing up in May). I remember it well — it was due to a culmination of monotony and unease.
5. Could be indirectly related to this, but after watching Social Dilemma in Netflix back in Mid-September, I also decided to cap my phone usage every day (and no phones in the evening, unless I am on call). Seeing more good days as well after that, but learnings on capping phone usage is for another day/year. lol.

Give it a go — there’s a lot of mood logs out there (some for teams too, like TeamMood). For personal logging, check out Moodee.

How would you describe your 2020?

Happy new year, everyone. We cautiously welcome 2021 and hope that what we learned from everything 2020 has thrown at us, and hope that it’s a little bit better, or at least trending upwards.