Creating simple logging "apps" with Google Forms

If you want to improve something, you've got to measure it first. Putting numbers on things helps us tame the wild waters of instinct and gut feeling. It helps us break things down and make them easy to understand. Numbers help us improve.

I've often felt the urge to create a means of recording something or the other in my life, and when I've had this urge, I've often fantasized about whipping out my Eclipse instance and putting together wonderful Android app that lets me record that thing and has a few dozen bells and whistles to boot. Of course, this never gets done, since I've never needed to record anything badly enough to create a dedicated app for it.

Recently though, I discovered a lovely shortcut to doing this, using Google Forms. I'm going to describe how to do that in this blog post. I mentioned in another article several ideas to help productivity. One of these was a recording what you eat and correlating productivity with it, so I chose that as my initial logging "app"/webpage.

Here's what the final result looks like:

This allows me to enter what I ate for dinner, breakfast, and lunch, and then in a 1-5 scale, rate how productive I felt at work and at home. The real trick was to keep the form simple. Once I conceived the idea of making this form, I wanted to add all sorts of bells and whistles - for example, if I wanted to track productivity, shouldn't I look at other major indicators? Maybe I should have a field for sleep, and another for any snacks that I ate. What if there were extenuating circumstances, like a friend visiting from out of state?

In the end I decided to include a catch-all "notes" field at the end of the form (not shown in the screenshot). I knew that if I made it too complicated, it would just be an excuse for me to procrastinate from filling it out at the end of the day when I'm tired anyway.

How to create the form

Step 1: Go to Google Forms and create a forms with the fields you want. In my example, I used type "text" for the breakfast/lunch/dinner fields, type "scale" for the rating fields, and type "paragraph text" for the notes field. This is what my "dinner" field looks like: 

Step 2: Make sure multiple responses per person are allowed in the form settings on the top of the page. 

Step 3: Go to File > Send Form. This will allow you to get the link to the form.

 

How to add the form to your phone

Step 4:  Copy the link and send it to your phone. You could just email it to yourself if you don't have a better way of doing it. 

Step 5: Open the link on your phone. On my Android phone, Chrome has the option to "Add to Homescreen":

If you tap that option, the OS will add an icon representing this form to your home screen. You can tap the icon, and it will open up your browser of choice with the form loaded! 

So there you have it - using this technique, you can make what is essentially a quick "App" to record any data you might want to on a daily or weekly basis in a convenient way using Google Forms. Whenever you want to check out your responses, and data logged so far, just log into your Google Drive, open up the form, and hit the View Responses button:

 

It might not be as neatly executed as a real app, but it will get the job done, and you can do it in five minutes, instead of spending hours coding an app!

Drop me a comment, letting me know what you use this technique for. :)

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The Power of Habit - Willpower

I'm about halfway through The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg now, and ever since his note on Keystone Habits, the book has been dragging on for a bit. I'm going to ignore his ramblings on organizational change and focus on the part that stood out to me the most in my reading today: his commentary on willpower and its role in habit formation.

I learned somewhere in High School the analogy that willpower is a finite resource. The more you use it, the more it gets depleted. Somehow, I feel like I internalized this in such a way that because willpower is a scarce resource, it should be conserved to be used when important. For example, I considered it okay to binge on snacks and junk food during exam-time when I had to use my willpower to focus on studying.

The Power of Habit likens willpower to be more like a muscle. The more you use it, he claims, the stronger it gets. This analogy is interesting because if it's more accurate than my idea of a finite resource, then my attitude towards willpower is like that of a man who is afraid that he might need to run someday, so he conserves his ability to run by never running. Of course, muscles being what they are, such a man would soon not be able to run very far at all.

The Power of Habit's suggestion (I had to weave through a good one-sixth of the book before I was able to distill it out) is that we can improve willpower by pre-planning our habits. So for instance, if you would like to get into the habit of ironing your clothes for the next day when you get home from work today, you should visualize in the morning how you're going to feel when you get home, how tired you'll be, and how you'll overcome that tiredness to power through and iron your clothes.

Another way of looking at it is that you would be "priming" yourself into making falling into the routine of ironing your clothes easier.

Here's what you can do: think of a habit you want to develop. It might be ironing your clothes at a certain time, or writing a blog post before bed, or cooking dinner instead of eating out. Visualize the crux moment when you usually give into temptation and ignore the task/chore you need to do and imagine yourself overcoming it. Do this everyday in the morning and hold on to it until you are able to develop the habit.

Here's the affiliate link to The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

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The Power of Habit - Keystone Habits

Continuing my reading today of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, I came across The Power of Habit's concept of "Keystone Habits." He presents this, in particular, in the context of organizational change - changing one key habit can spiral into other changes that blossom into large-scale shifts in the organization in question, but suggests that it can be applied on the individual level as well.

The man The Power of Habit uses to present this idea is Paul O'Niell. O'Niell was the CEO of the aluminium manufacturing company Alcoa, and when he came in, Alcoa wasn't doing very well. There was a great deal of friction between management and unions, competitors were stealing business, and morale was low amongst employees.

O'Niell, The Power of Habit says, understood the power of keystone habits (it's funny how often these self-help books explain successful person X as understanding attribute Y of the framework they're presenting). He decided to focus on the keystone habit of "safety" and focusing on this habit improved operations all over Alcoa, and helped make the company ridiculously successful over O'Niell's tenure.

This in itself made me pause for a bit. While O'Niell's success in undeniable, is safety something you can call a habit? I would call it more of a priority, or a value, as opposed to a habit. Additionally, The Power of Habit fails to recognize what focusing on safety truly was for O'Niell - it was a political master-stroke. Faced with an environment fraught with labour-management tensions, safety was the banner everyone would have to rally behind, or else they would be painted as black sheep. What union leader, or manager would dare oppose an action justified in the name of safety?

The icing on the cake for this portion of the book though, was a passage in which The Power of Habit describes how, during his tenure on some government job, The Power of Habit was trying to solve the problem of child mortality, and he traces the root cause of the problem from child mortality to child malnutrition to the child's mother's malnutrition during pregnancy to the mother's education to the mother's teachers to those teachers' college education in nutrition and biology. This is where, The Power of Habit says, O'Niell attacked the problem. And then right at the end of the passage, he tacks on, “Today, the U.S. infant mortality rate is 68 percent lower than when O’Neill started the job.”

Like, really? You're going to tell me (or at least heavily imply) that just because O'Niell recommended changing a few curricula, the US has less infant mortality today? There's absolutely no support of this claim, and it's a basic correlation-causation error any Psych 101 student can spot. The Power of Habit lost a lot of credibility in my eyes with that claim, and this Daily Beast article suggests O'Niell himself disavowed himself from that statement.

That said, I do find the idea of keystone habits on an individual level interesting. It related with a concept I read in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard about how, when attempting to change, we should take a single, actionable item, and focus on that. Once that change is achieved, it provides the momentum to create a ripple effect that causes other, hopefully positive changes.


To this effect, I'm personally trying to cultivate in myself the habit of writing more often. I'm hoping that developing this will be a keystone habit will have a spillover effect by improving my communication skills, comprehension and whatnot. I don't think it will reduce the infant mortality rate of the US by two-thirds, but then again, not all of us can be Paul O'Niell.

Here's the an affiliate link to The Power of Habit if you'd like to support my blog. And here's the non-affiliate link if you're not into that. :)

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

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