Track your mood once a day, at the same anchor point (bedtime is ideal), on a simple five-point scale (terrible, bad, okay, good, great) and attach one line about the day. That's the entire method that works. The elaborate versions (hourly ratings, 40-emotion taxonomies, multi-axis scoring) produce richer data and abandoned trackers, in that order. One honest reading a night, held for months, beats them all, because the value of mood data is almost entirely in its continuity.
Know what you're collecting it for: not to fix your feelings, but to see them at a resolution memory can't manage. Your memory of "how you've been lately" is a terrible instrument: it's dominated by the last three days and the single worst moment of the month. Ninety nightly readings correct it. Rough stretches turn out to have edges. Good weeks turn out to follow visible causes. That correction alone changes how you talk to yourself about your own life.
Why five points is the right resolution
A five-point scale is coarse on purpose. Out of ten, you'll burn your thirty seconds litigating whether tonight is a six or a seven; five points makes the answer land in about a second, and the aggregate, which is the only thing that matters, comes out just as accurate. You're not measuring your soul, you're taking a nightly temperature.
Coarse also means honest. Fine-grained scales invite performance: nudging the number toward the person you'd like to be having. It's hard to lie in a five-point scale; the day was bad or it wasn't. And on the nights you can't say why you feel off: "okay, can't say why" is a complete, valid entry. Three of those in a row is exactly the kind of pattern the tracking exists to catch.
Reading the data: what 30+ days shows you
Weekday rhythm appears first: for most people a midweek dip and a Saturday peak, but yours is yours, and knowing Tuesday runs low reframes a low Tuesday from personal failure to weather. Then come the correlations, which is where the one-line note earns its keep: the mood row tells you good days cluster, the notes tell you what they cluster around: exercise, certain people, actually finishing things, sunlight.
The most valuable and least fun pattern is the lag. Bad sleep, skipped workouts, heavy weeks often bill you a day or two later, and without written data the delay hides the cause completely. When you can see that this week's slump started two days after the crunch began, you stop being mystified by your own weather, and you start seeing it coming.
The two failure modes, and the serious caveat
Failure mode one: over-instrumenting, tracking mood alongside sleep, steps, caffeine, and six habits until the dashboard becomes a job you quit. Add nothing until the nightly rating has survived a full month. Failure mode two: rumination, treating every low reading as a problem demanding analysis. Most low days are just days; log it, close the app, let the aggregate do the thinking.
And the caveat that matters: self-tracking is a mirror, not treatment. If the chart shows low mood holding for weeks without lifting, that's not a pattern to optimize. That's the signal to talk to a professional, and bringing your data along makes that first conversation concretely better. A mood tracker's most important feature is helping you notice that it's time.
A year of moods you can look at
One Percent turns the year into a 365-dot view. One Percent records a short daily highlight and lowlight. The app presents your entries as a record, not a mental-health assessment.
One Percent shows daily notes and mood over time. One Percent provides iPhone widgets. You can notice a pattern and decide whether it deserves more context or qualified support.
The app behind the dots
One Percent.
One Percent turns the year into a 365-dot view. One Percent records a short daily highlight and lowlight. One Percent shows daily notes and mood over time. One Percent provides iPhone widgets.