Overview

For this assignment, I decided to track my water consumption. I have a very bad habit of not drinking enough water, so I thought that this would be a helpful activity for me. 

I set a reminder every hour to write down how many cups of water I have drank within the last hour. Below is the data that I collected over two days.

Data

Day 1

Day 2

Experience

Overall, I had a great experience with this habit tracking activity. Compared to “Measuring Me Take 1,” where we had to track our activity every 15 minutes, doing a short check-in every hour felt very approachable and not nearly as disruptive. It also helped that the kind of data collected required little effort to record – in the first Measuring Me activity, we had to write out in words exactly what we were doing. For this one, all I needed to do was write down a number.

In terms of behavior change, the check-ins definitely encouraged me to drink more water. I often do not even realize that I haven’t drinken water in hours or am thirsty. 

2 models

I created the two following models based on what I noticed caused me to drink water. Because my check-ins simply recorded how much water I drank, without other information, I deduced these connections/links based on information from my Google Calendar, which I follow closely and includes information on where I was and what I was doing each hour.

Connection Circle

Feedback Loops

A simplified version:

Next Time

I felt that one-hour intervals were appropriate for this activity. However, rather than prompting myself to simply write down how much water I’ve drinken, if I were to do this activity again, I would probably instead directly tell myself to drink water every hour. I think that this would actually make me drink more water vs. just recording if I happen to do it.