My Critically Experienced Day
I spent the entire day of Thursday, October 21st rating and reviewing my experience of the day. From 22 individual ratings, I rated the day an average 3.4 out of 5 stars, with a median of 4.
The Experience of Rating
I created a simple rating template, printed out multiple copies, and carried a clipboard around with me for the day. Here is a pdf of the rating sheet I used, in case you want to try it too. For this experiment, I wasn't interested in rating people, products, or appearances. Instead, I attempted to rate the individual experiences that made up my day.
A few observations from this experiment:
- Forcing myself to articulate how I was feeling and then to jot down what is was that caused my grievance actually made for a pretty nice experience of the day. It helped me to separate my feelings which were a result of my experiences from my emotional state.
- I found myself a lot more empathetic throughout the day. Ironically, rather than being more self-interested, I found myself really reflecting on my relationship with others and what our interactions were.
- The most difficult times during my day were work-related. Specifically digital communication didn't invoke empathy for others in me when reviewing my experience, in the same way that my in-person interactions shifted.
- My day got significantly better once I got home. This is also the part of my day when I most allowed the experiment to influence my decision making. I didn't want to do nothing on my phone or just watch TV for too long, because I didn't want to have those experiences dominate my day. I became a lot more cognizant of my own "free time."
- I had a good amount of personal interaction time with my daughter, and didn't want to bother with the minutiae of rating it separately. Putting it all into one section of "time with Mollie" helped me to segment that time, while respecting her boundaries and being present for the moment.
Looking at My Day as Data
Doing the data entry of translating my written notations into a digital spreadsheet created a mix of disassociation and sense memory. When I first read the star rating and the activity, my instinct was to think "oh, it wasn't actually that bad" but then reading the details about why I had the experience, my initial ratings were reinforced and confirmed for me. Once I had the data in spreadsheet form, I started to ask different questions about the ratings themselves. Where was I physically when I had the best ratings? What was the overall amount of time that I spent feeling a certain way? The impact of the ratings changes drastically if you compare the individual ratings vs the time represented by each rating. My overall average rating was a 3.4 out of 5 stars. However, if you compare the pie charts to look at the amount of time that was spent, you get more of a narrative about how I actually experienced the day.
