How a Minimalist Journal App Helped Me Visualize Seven Years in Seven Seconds
By Prasanth Kancharla
Prasanth Kancharla is a product manager and writer at Product Pickle, where he shares his observations on product design and strategy. Stay up to date with Prasanth on LinkedIn.
Daylio has transformed my journaling experience. It’s an example of how thoughtful design and data-driven insights can aid in creating and maintaining lasting habits
I’ve always struggled to keep up with my personal journal. Despite knowing the benefits of taking time to reflect on my thoughts daily, maintaining the habit has been a challenge. I still try and have experimented with a few tools to help me along.
A few years ago, I discovered Daylio—a minimalist journal app that lets me log key moments in my day with just a few clicks. I began using Daylio as a supplement to my traditional journal. While I remained inconsistent with my other journal, I've been remarkably consistent with Daylio ever since I installed it. I believe the genius of Daylio lies in its design—it not only kept me on track, but it has also provided insights I never got from traditional journaling.
What is Daylio?
Daylio is a minimalist journal app for capturing daily moods and activities. Users select their mood, choose activities, and optionally add a picture or brief note. A typical entry takes less than a minute. Using Daylio is simple: First, select your mood on a scale from “Rad” to “Awful.” Next, choose activities from a pre-populated list based on past entries.
That's it—your entry is complete.
How is it different from other traditional journals?
In traditional journaling—whether it’s a diary or one of the digital equivalents—you typically start with a blank page. Even with practice, it takes time to organize your thoughts and fill in the page. For example, I currently use an app called RedNotebook as my digital journal, where I start on a blank page each day.
Daylio, on the other hand, eliminates the blank-page problem by providing a structured starting point. The mood selection in Step 1 sets the tone for my entry, helping me to reflect quickly. For most “Good” days, I just select the mood and the activities, but if I select something different, I add a few words to reflect more.
Daylio is designed for quick entries on days you don’t feel like writing, making it simple and easy to stay consistent.
What have I learned from using Daylio?
Another challenge with my RedNotebook is that it doesn’t automatically provide any insights from my entries. I go through past entries either by selecting the day or through the tags I assign. One of Daylio’s key strengths lies in its automatic insights generation.
For example, it generates end-of-month summaries that show mood variations and activities I have spent the most time on. Additionally, the activity view offers an overview of how I’ve spent my time, helping me to understand patterns such as:
How often went to gym last month
Which activities dominate my daily routine
My progress on newly adopted habits
The Mood Count chart is particularly helpful, as it allows me to quickly assess how my month went and compare it with previous months.
Visualizing seven years in seven seconds
The real magic of Daylio became apparent when I realized just how powerful its data visualization is over the long term. Over years of use, the app enabled me to summarize my mood trends, activity breakdowns, and general life patterns into a few simple charts. While its default monthly summaries are good and easy to follow, I had to do some extra work to make the yearly data visually interesting.
In the below chart, I created a representation of my moods over the 365 days period to show how it varied across 2023:
It’s amazing how a single image can give me the snapshot of an entire year, with all its ups and downs. Inspired by this, I created a similar chart for each of the past seven years and turned them into a GIF, allowing me to see a snapshot of seven years in just seven seconds!
A product that grows with you
Daylio stays true to user needs and addresses key challenges for users who want to log their lives in a simple, non-intrusive way. It is one of those products where the value multiplies over time. When I started using it, I didn’t realize I could create a visualization that represents seven years of data in seven seconds.
It’s one of the few apps where being a daily active user benefits you more than the product itself. It’s also one of those products that I didn’t know I needed, but I am glad I tried it.
PS: While I haven’t focused on the privacy aspects of Daylio, it is an important consideration for an app like this. Daylio stores all data locally on your device and does not have access to it. For more information, please refer to their privacy policy. Additionally, all the charts shown in this article were created with mock data and do not represent any personal information.