30 May 2017
By Josh
Josh

Quantify the things that affect your behaviour with Optimise

We just launched a new feature we're calling Optimise. We wanted to take the correlations we already find in your data, one of the more powerful features of Exist, and quantify how much they really affect your behaviour. We hope this will help make it obvious what has the most effect on how productive, happy, or active you are.

Here are a few examples.

I get more steps:

More steps when you track "city"

Using our (currently in-beta) custom tag integration, I can see that one of the biggest changes in my steps comes from when I tag my day with "city" (the highlighted days in the graph). Unsurprisingly, this happens when I have a reason to go to the city, instead of just working from home. Heading into the city more than doubles my average step count, so if I want to be more active, I should find more reasons to leave the 'burbs. (Anyone want to grab a coffee?)

Belle is more productive:

More productive when you're in bed less

Here's one of my co-founder Belle's results for productivity. It turns out that on average Belle is more productive when she spends less time in bed, even when that means she's only getting just enough sleep. Generally we think that getting enough sleep is an important factor for work (increases our energy and concentration, among other things), but it seems for Belle personally this isn't always the case.

I'm happier:

Happier when you sleep longer

Finally, here's a mood result for me. On average, getting a decent sleep is one of the strongest predictors of a good day for me (a rating of at least 4 out of 5 in my daily review). I can even see that none of the lowest bars in the graph, my unhappiest days, occurred when I got a good sleep. That's a pretty strong reminder to me that I should work harder on getting more sleep if I want to be happier.

I hope you'll find your own results similarly enlightening and actionable! If you're already an Exist user, you'll find Optimise under your Data tab on the web site. If you don't have an account yet, have a look at the services we support or sign up for a free trial.

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