Use Daylio to Track Mood and Focus Against Work Blocks

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Why I Started Tracking My Mood With Daylio

I didn’t set out to track my mood every day. It started because I couldn’t tell if I was actually burning out… or just being forgetful. Familiar?

The problem wasn’t that I was always grumpy — it was that I kept telling myself I was “fine” even when I hadn’t finished a single work block for days. I’d sit there, Zapier window open, trying to fix a trigger that had mysteriously stopped working. Again. Three hours later, I’d realize I forgot to eat lunch. Again.

I stumbled on Daylio in a Reddit thread, someone had mentioned they used it to track productivity instead of just emotions. That actually clicked.

What hooked me immediately was that it doesn’t force you to type anything. You get mood faces (happy, meh, etc.) and then you can tap on activities — work, study, relax, cleaning, whatever. I added custom ones like “debugged webhook” and “resent Gmail draft for third time.” It made me laugh and that helped me stick with it 🙂

So instead of journaling (which I always forget by day three), I just tap my mood once or twice a day. Now here’s the weird part — I started noticing that most of my bad days weren’t random. They followed a pattern. Days where I opened Zapier before 9am? Almost always ended in a neutral or unhappy face. Days where I started work with a 5-minute Daylio update? Much better outcomes.

Noticing that changed how I plan my days. Now I log every work block: planning, execution, automation, debugging. If I skip the log, I can actually feel it later. Like my brain starts drifting between tabs and nothing ever closes.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Mood logs might not fix work itself, but they’re great for catching when you’re fooling yourself.

Setting Up Daylio To Reflect Actual Workflow

The default Daylio setup is cute but totally useless for actual workflow tracking. It took about a week of trial and error (and a few rants in Notion) to get the categories and activities just right.

First off: mood scale. You can keep five moods — Daylio lets you rename them, but I stuck to their standard faces:
– 😀 Great
– 🙂 Good
– 😐 Neutral
– 😕 Bad
– 😡 Awful

I almost never use Awful, but Neutral tells me a ton. Most of my “lost time” days sit in the Neutral zone, which helped me spot where I drop focus without even realizing it.

Then I added very specific custom activities. Instead of just “Work” and “Computer,” here’s what I included:
– Inbox Wrangling
– Automation Succeeded
– Automation Failed
– Rebuilt From Scratch (you know the feeling)
– Manual Task (sigh)
– Meeting That Should Have Been Async
– Tech Setup That Should Have Worked But Didn’t
– Documentation Brain Melt

Here’s a basic table to show how these match my work blocks:

Especially that last one. I made it a routine: if I close more than six tabs, I log it as “Deleted 14 Tabs 😂” — even when it’s just eight. It’s a small dopamine hit, but it’s effective.

What’s *not* obvious — Daylio only lets you set one mood per entry. So if your afternoon devolved from Functional to Frustrated, you need to log a second entry. That’s fine. I usually do one log mid-morning and one around 6pm. Sometimes I add one at lunch if something unexpectedly explodes.

Using Reminders Without Driving Yourself Nuts

Daylio has built-in reminders, but I ignored them at first because I thought they were just for bedtime journaling. Turns out — they’re way more useful when set up around work flows.

Here’s what I do now:
– 9:20 AM → “Kickoff log” reminder. I delay real work until I mood check.
– 3:00 PM → “Mid-block checkin” reminder. It’s less about feelings, more about catching if I totally derailed.
– 6:45 PM → “Evening review” reminder. I reflect. Did I actually do the thing I set out to do?

The reminders are non-intrusive. They show up as a OS-level notification (on iPhone, at least), and you can tap directly from the lock screen into that day’s log. But if you ignore them, they don’t yell.

Pro tip: if you snooze too many Daylio reminders, the app quietly deactivates them. It doesn’t tell you either — I had a full week where none of mine went off. I only realized it when I noticed my graph had gaps. Super annoying, and I haven’t found a fix aside from occasionally just toggling all of them off and back on 🤷

Detecting When Your Focus Starts Slipping

Let’s talk about visibility. You don’t notice drift until you’re already in the middle of it. Daylio graphs won’t solve that, but daily patterns will start to shout at you.

Here’s a pattern I spotted by accident:

Every Tuesday started strong. Green bar, 3–4 completed entries. But Thursday afternoons were mostly blank. I thought I was just busy. Wrong. I was circling between Slack, Gmail drafts, and failed Notion templates for three hours.

Another one: Anytime I forced myself through a morning meeting I didn’t want to attend, the next Daylio entry was almost always weaker. Neutral or Bad. Even if the tasks were identical. I couldn’t feel it in the moment, but logging it created a breadcrumb trail. It made it visible.

This stuff doesn’t need fancy AI. It just needs a way for past-you to warn future-you.

The best trick I’ve come up with:
– If I log a Rebuilt From Scratch more than two days in a row, I block Friday morning for deep cleanup. No meetings, no new builds. Just relinking broken triggers.

It sounds dramatic, but wow. That one change improved the mood column more than any change in tools or clients. Friday mornings are calm now. Or at least not covered in Zap reruns.

How I Use Color Tags For Fast Filtering

This took me a while to bother setting up. In Daylio, every activity item has a little icon and color tag. You can edit both. I originally left them defaulted, so everything was some shade of blue.

Big mistake 😅

Now I use specific color coding across all activities:
– 🔵 Blue → Deep work (build / debug / brainstorm)
– 🟣 Purple → Communication (email / meeting / update)
– 🟢 Green → Success moments (automation working, task completed)
– 🔴 Red → Friction (blocked item, client pushback, tool bug)
– 🟠 Orange → Recovery activities (walks, breaks, context switching)

It gets nerdy fast, but now when I scroll back through a week, I can skim the colors and immediately see where I had too many Reds and Purples stacked together — which always means burnout incoming.

The Daylio calendar view also lights up based on your most common activities that day. So if I handle 3 successful automations on Monday, I’ll see a Green ring beside that date. If I spend all Tuesday fixing broken form tags, I’ll see Red. It’s subtle, but accurate.

Hidden Traps In Daylio CSV Export

Exporting your Daylio entries to CSV feels like it should be simple. It is. Sort of. But more than once, I got excited to analyze my mood versus productivity in Google Sheets — only to find that Daylio had silently dropped line items.

Here’s what to watch for:

1. If you log more than one mood in a day, only the last one exports.
2. Repetitive activities logged multiple times don’t stack. You won’t see that you did “Automation Succeeded” three separate times. It’ll just list it once.
3. Custom activity names are exported as plain text — no icons or colors — so if you’re relying on visuals in the app, the spreadsheet will feel flat.
4. Weird one — if you rename a mood or activity, Daylio’s CSV will still list the old one unless you re-export anew. I found this out after changing “Manual Task” to “Ugh Manual Again” and seeing both listed separately in my CSV.

My workaround: export weekly, not monthly. Smaller files, fewer data quirks.

Also, if you want to actually calculate how often you hit a deep work state right after a Red-tagged item… just build a custom pivot table. It’s clunky, and honestly if someone made a Daylio viewer app with real queries I’d pay money.

When Daylio Deletes Reminders Without Telling You

This one took out an entire project week.

I had reminders set for 9:20am and 3:00pm like clockwork. Then one week — nothing. No pings. No daily logs. My whole flow broke.

I thought maybe I had Do Not Disturb on. Nope. Turns out: if you snooze the same Daylio reminder too many times *without opening the app*, it stops showing future notifications. Fully silent failure. No warnings, no popups, no settings toggle.

I confirmed this by checking Settings → Reminders — they were still listed. But the iOS notifications tab had Daylio disabled. I reenabled it, toggled reminders off/on inside Daylio, and… boom. Next day, it worked again.

So now I manually open Daylio once every two days, even if I don’t write anything. It’s dumb, but it avoids silent reminder death. And I now have a backup reminder inside Apple Reminders that just says: “Open Daylio on Thursday.” Kinda recursive. But it works.

:tada: