Saturday, February 9, 2013

Where to start?

Every now and then I take a break from what I'm doing with Mood Sentry to review how I started with it.  I started with the My Experiences and the Reminders.  I created these based on a one page sheet I created and reviewed every morning.  Actually, there were two versions of this sheet.  When I tried to transfer those pages to the phone for the convenience of having them wherever and whenever I needed, the one page format didn't work.  It was just too cumbersome to scroll through the whole sheet on my phone's display.  I reviewed each sheet and realized that each was effectively a reminder with examples of how different cognitive distortions manifest each day, with some suggestions of how I can mitigate their effects.  That led me to create the My Experiences and Reminders functions of the app.  I found it to be a good exercise to tailor the distortion list to my needs and figure others might get a benefit from doing the same.  When I first started with the reminders I kept them short and simple, such as "think about your day and what might come up, then review My Experiences."  As I used the reminders more, I added more detail and instructions.  Note that "My Experiences" was originally titled "My Distortions."  I changed it just in case someone is shoulder surfing.  "My Experiences" just looks and sounds a bit less dramatic.  Does this help?

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