When I lived in the Bay Area, I commuted to work on Caltrain. It took me about 20 minutes to get home - a perfect amount of time for me to journal about the day's events. In particular, I'd write about what I had enjoyed doing most at work that day and what I'd enjoyed least. Over time, I saw patterns emerge, and I started to get a better sense of what kind of work I wanted to do going forward. In fact, this journaling played a crucial role in my decision to transition to a career in software engineering.
Now that I live in LA, I don't ride Caltrain any more - I either drive or walk to work. While I love the chance to listen to the news or get some exercise during my commute, I miss the routine of journaling. To encourage me to get back into this habit, I'm building an app that will remind me to journal every day and store my responses.
- The app will send me a text message at 5pm every weekday: "What did you enjoy doing most at work today?"
- I will be able to respond to this text message, and the app will save my response.
- If I respond, the app will send me a second text message: "What did you enjoy doing least at work today?"
- I will be able to respond to this message and save that response too.
- I will be able to go to a website to see a record of my previous responses.
- Any user will be able to create an account on the app. Users will be able to see only their own responses - not anybody else's.
- Every Saturday (or perhaps on Monday mornings), the app will email users a summary of their responses for the previous week.
- The weekly summary will include word clouds to show the terms most commonly used in the user's positive and negative responses.
- The app will invite users to respond to this weekly summary and save their responses.
- The app will look for patterns within each user's responses (perhaps via natural language processing) and surface these trends in some way.
- The app will look for patterns across different user's responses and surface them in some way.
- Users will be able to choose to receive and send messages via Slack or email rather than SMS.