We’ve all heard the adage that we should sleep 8 hours each night to stay healthy, and now there are mobile apps that you can use to track your sleeping habits and see how much sleep you are or are not getting. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of these sleep-tracking apps and discuss which one makes the most sense for tracking your nightly sleep hours. Is Google Calendar really the best way to track your sleep?
How I used Microsoft Excel to track my sleep
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A few years ago, I started experimenting with tracking my nightly sleep. While initially I found it easier to record data directly in a spreadsheet, I eventually shifted my efforts toward using an app on my phone. My initial experiment failed because I didn’t have a good sense of how much time I was actually spending sleeping vs. just lying in bed awake, but when I started tracking my sleep in a calendar, everything clicked. Now that I’ve logged over 1,000 nights of sleep, I thought it might be useful to share what worked for me and why you might want to try something similar. [More detailed explanation about his process]
Why I stopped using Microsoft Excel
For years I tracked my sleep patterns with a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. And for years it drove me absolutely crazy. Now that I’m using Google Calendar, my life is so much easier! Here’s why you should consider making a switch too.
First, if you have multiple devices in multiple locations it can be very difficult to keep your data synchronized and up-to-date. You might want one copy of your calendar on your computer at work and another copy on your phone.
How I use Google Calendar instead
Logging my sleep isn’t something I do consistently. It’s been over a month since I last did it. But when I first began tracking my deep, restful and light sleeps—along with wake times and thoughts throughout each day—I wasn’t using Google Calendar. Instead, I was using Sleep Cycle on my iPhone. Now that app doesn’t work for me anymore. So what should you use? Here are some options For Android: Sleep as Android or Good Morning Alarm Clock . Both apps have built-in integration with Google Calendar. You can set alarms from within them or simply open up your calendar and create events based off how long you slept or if you woke up at all during the night.
3 tips for successful tracking with Google Calendar
1. Set Your Time Zone Correctly: If you live in New York City, your time zone is likely Eastern Standard Time (EST). However, if you travel frequently and change time zones a lot, it’s better to go with UTC/GMT as a time zone setting. Why? Because then all of your calendar events are automatically adjusted for daylight saving time. If you use EST, you have to manually adjust each event when DST goes into effect or ends each year—and that can be a big pain! 2. Use 24-Hour Time Formatting: When tracking sleep times on Google Calendar, it’s much easier to read when times are displayed using military or 24-hour format instead of AM/PM.
Future directions
There are several ways that you can use Google Calendar for tracking your daily activities and mood. I have been using it for a few years now and have found it useful, but I do have some suggestions on how it could be improved to make better use of your time. 1) Waking up: The default alarm setting is to turn off automatically after 20 minutes. This means if you don’t stop it by then, you will wake up late every day. A more useful feature would be an option where once you dismiss an alarm (either with snooze or turning off), it stays dismissed until manually turned back on again.