About five weeks ago, on February 6th to be exact, Nicholas Felton’s Reporter app shipped.

The whole gist of the app is to give yourself a pretty good idea of how you spend your time, where you spend your time, and who you spend it with. I set up Reporter to ask me 11 questions related to where I was, who I was with, my outfit, if I was eating/drinking anything, my mood and general feeling of productivity for the day, the tools I was using at the time, and what the last app I had launched was.

My first report was logged on at 9:49am on Thursday morning, February 6. My last report at 1:04pm on Monday morning, February 17. I only used the app for 12 days. As much as I loved the idea of Reporter, the multiple interruptions throughout my day weren’t worth the aggregate data I was collecting.

From the 12 days I used the app, I learned that 92-percent of the time I was feeling productive with my day and 98-percent of the time I was in a happy mood. Most of my outfits consisted of pants, slippers, and a sweater (Polar Vortex, remember?); only once did I wear a hat and only once did I get prompted for a report while in my underwear. I mostly drank water. My most commonly-used tools were my Mac and my Clicky Keyboard. A little over half the time I was working; the vast majority of my time was spent at home; most of the time I was alone, but when I was with someone it was usually my oldest son, Noah.

One interesting-slash-revealing fact I learned was regarding the apps I was launching on my iPhone. Reporter would ask me what app I had previously launched. I answered this by double-tapping my Home button to bring up the multitasking card view just enough to see what app was next in line. The most common app I found there was Threes game, with Email in second place, and then Tweetbot. Hmm.

Is this the truth revealing itself? Perhaps. But perhaps not. As I pontificated on one of my Shawn Today podcast episodes a few weeks ago when talking about this same topic, I recall being much more likely to fill out the Reporter report if I was already doing something non-trivial on my iPhone or if I was not in the company of others.

I often would ignore the reports when I was in the middle of reading, or writing, or when I was with other people (especially when I was with Anna). So it’s hard to say just how accurate these reports reflect my life, let alone the 12-day segment.

In the end, I stopped using Reporter because, as I mentioned above, the frequent interruptions were not worth the aggregate data they were generating.

But I’ve found another way to help automate the “reporting” process using some apps that I already have in my iOS tool belt: Launch Center Pro and Day One.

I came across these Launch Center Pro actions that Josiah Wiebe cooked up, and I think they’re very clever. Josiah has put together a handful of customized Launch Center Pro actions for the purpose of logging meals, drinks, books, films, and more. Using the actions in Launch Center Pro basically enables you to answer a few questions (some of which can even be multiple-choice) and then auto-insert those answers into Day One in a nicely formatted layout.

For example, here’s my Coffee Log entry from yesterday morning’s brew.

I also installed several of Josiah’s actions into my Launch Center Pro, and for the past ten days I’ve been using the coffee log and the daily summary. Though, I tweaked his actions slightly to build versions that are more suited to my own needs and layout preferences.

For example, since I almost always get my coffee from one of two local roasters — Parisi or Broadway (if I didn’t roast it myself) — I changed my Coffee Log action to offer the Roaster as a multiple choice option. And for my Daily Summary action, I set up a reminder in Launch Center Pro to ping me each evening.

• Here is my Daily Summary action
• Here is my Coffee Log action (with my KC roasters list removed)

Since Day One already is grabbing my location, weather, steps taken, and I can add a photo if I like (a selfie, perhaps?), I find these daily summaries to be an excellent compromise when compared to the more-detailed, but more frequent logging of Reporter.

However, it’s not a perfect system. For one, I miss is the way Reporter auto-populated certain answers making it easy to answer the same thing again. In LCP, if I am entering in the same answer to the same question on a regular basis I either have to type that answer in manually, or decide if I want to limit my answers to a pre-defined multiple choice list. There is no option (that I know of) to offer a multiple-choice prompt that can be converted into a text entry prompt on the fly.

And, now that I’m entering in more and more entries which use markdown-based tables and header tags, my Day One timeline view is not so pretty any more. Because Day One shows the raw markdown in its “timeline” view. I mentioned this to Paul Mayne on Twitter, however, and he said it’s something they’d like to add to the 2.0 update of Day One.

Speaking of potential future updates to Day One, I think it’d be great to see this sort of “guided/automated logging” built into Day One. The app already offers reminders that remind you to write in your journal, but sometimes that wide-open blank page is just too intimidating. Having specific questions can not only lead to more frequent journaling/logging, but when you’re answering the same ones over and over, though it may feel silly in the moment, over time it paints a picture about our lives that when we look back at it, we are reminded of who we were and who we are.

That’s why I’m personally quite the advocate for daily journaling. Because little things, day by day, usually don’t seem like much in the moment, but over the course of months and years, we are changing and maturing as individuals and it can be so valuable and downright encouraging to be able to look back and see that change.

Or, in the words of Kayli Stollak: “All you need is a sentence, a word, a thought, and suddenly you remember who you actually were.”