How to keep an activity diary

8 minute read

An activity diary, also called an activity record or activity log, is an hour by hour account of what you did and how you felt while you did it. Clinicians call keeping one activity monitoring. It is one of the oldest tools in cognitive behavioral therapy and one of the simplest. This guide covers what it is for, what to write, how to rate an hour, and what a filled-in day looks like.

What an activity record is for

The record's job is to show you how your days actually go. It asks you to notice, not to do anything differently. In a 2010 review, Jonathan Kanter and colleagues describe activity monitoring this way, as a way of gathering information rather than a way of changing behavior. What you notice is useful in several ways.

It shows how your time is actually spent. How much you do, how varied it is, and where the week has narrowed.
It connects what you do with how you feel. Seeing that link in your own hours is more convincing than being told it exists.
It shows where enjoyment and achievement turn up, through the pleasure and mastery ratings, and where they are missing.
It brings avoidance into view. Hours that go to getting away from something are easy to miss until they are written down.
It keeps small things from being lost. Looking back, memory of a week gets colored by how you feel now, and a low mood makes small successes and small pleasures easy to overlook. A written record keeps them in view.
It gives you something to compare with later. A record kept now shows how things change from here.

If you have thought about what matters most to you, a week on paper can also show how well your days fit with it.

What goes in each hour

Three things. It takes a little thought at first and gets quick with practice.

What you were doing. A few words is plenty. Commute. Emails. Lay on the couch scrolling. Be concrete enough that you will recognize the hour next week. "Relaxing" hides a lot, and "watched two episodes" does not.
How strong one feeling was. Pick the feeling you most want to understand and rate it for that hour. Anxious, low, irritable, lonely, content. Zero means you did not feel it at all, and the top of the scale means the most you have ever felt it. Following one feeling keeps the pattern readable. You can note others alongside it, and if the feeling swung a lot within the hour, a note can say so.
Pleasure and mastery, if you want them. How much enjoyment the hour held, and how much sense of achievement. Both come from Beck's original form and have their own article.

Many paper worksheets rate on a scale of 0 to 10. The app and the online worksheet use 0 to 100 by default, with 0 to 10 available as an option. Either works. Pick one and keep it, because the value is in comparing your hours with each other.

An example day

Here is part of one weekday, following anxiety, rated 0 to 10.

Feeling followed: anxious. Every rating runs 0 to 10. Some afternoon and evening hours are left out to keep the table short.
Hour	What I was doing	Anxious	Pleasure	Mastery
7 AM	Woke early, lay in bed going over the day	7	1	0
8 AM	Breakfast, checked email	6	3	2
9 AM	Worked on the report	4	2	6
10 AM	Team meeting	8	1	3
11 AM	Answered messages	6	2	4
12 PM	Lunch outside with Sam	2	8	1
1 PM	Not logged
2 PM	Back to back calls	7	1	5
4 PM	Errands	4	3	5
6 PM	Made dinner	3	5	6
8 PM	Watched a show	2	6	0
10 PM	Lay awake thinking about tomorrow	7	0	0

Even one day shows a shape. Anxiety ran highest in the meeting and the calls, and in the two hours spent lying in bed going over things, first thing and last thing. During the hour on the report it was down to 4, and that hour gave as much sense of achievement as any. Lunch with Sam and the evening show were the calmest hours, and lunch was the best for pleasure. The show was pleasant and achieved nothing, which is fine.

None of that is a conclusion yet. One day is a snapshot, and a week or two starts to be a picture. The blank at 1 PM is fine too. A gap you can see is more honest than a guess.

When to write it down

Ideally, each hour as it ends, or as close to that as you can. Memory for how a particular hour felt fades quickly, and it gets colored by how you feel when you look back. That is why researchers who study everyday experience take ratings in the moment when they can. Shiffman, Stone and Hufford reviewed that approach and its reasons in 2008.

If you forget or cannot get to it, catching up is still worth doing. In 2004 Kahneman and colleagues had people walk back through the previous day in order, one part at a time. Across the group, what they reported closely matched what in-the-moment studies usually find. So if you miss a few hours, fill them in as soon as you can by walking through them in order instead of guessing at the whole. Then go back to filling it in as you go. If you miss a whole day, you can walk back through it the same way the next morning, or leave it blank if it is too hazy.

Reminders make it easier to keep up. The app can remind you up to twelve times a day, and a reminder can open straight to that hour. On paper, a sheet folded in a pocket or stuck on the fridge does the same job.

How long to keep it

A week is a good first stretch. It is long enough to include a weekend and the days you dread. Two weeks shows patterns by day of the week more clearly. After that, keep going if it earns its place. Some people keep a lighter version for months, and some return to it when things change. In therapy, a record is often set as homework between sessions and kept going as other work begins.

What tends to get in the way

Rating the day instead of the hour

On a hard day every hour tends to get the same number. Try to rate each hour on its own. The differences between hours are where the information is.

Writing only the bad hours

The ordinary and better hours matter just as much. Seeing what goes with the better hours is half of what the record is for.

Editing yourself

"Nothing" and "stayed in bed" are real entries. The record only helps if it is honest, and nobody else has to see it.

Expecting it to change things by itself

Keeping a record sometimes shifts behavior a little on its own, an effect Korotitsch and Nelson-Gray describe in their 1999 review as reactivity. That is a side effect, not the aim. The value of the record is in what it shows you. Making sense of your record covers how to read it.

Where it comes from

Aaron Beck and his colleagues included a weekly activity chart in their 1979 manual for treating depression, with ratings for mastery and pleasure. Kanter and colleagues later found some form of activity monitoring in almost every version of behavioral activation, a treatment for depression built on this part of CBT. Current self-help workbooks still use it. Greenberger and Padesky's Mind Over Mood, for example, has readers keep an activity record for a week before any planning begins, and gives planning its own separate worksheet.

A record can inform other techniques, and it is often kept alongside them, but it is not the same as them. Activity scheduling can use the same kind of grid, but you fill it in ahead of time with activities you plan to do. Behavioral experiments, which test a particular prediction by trying something out, are different again. The activity record in CBT and behavioral activation explains how they fit together.

Paper, browser, or app

All three hold the same record. The printable sheets fit a day or a week on one page. The online worksheet needs no account, saves in your browser, and builds an intensity map and plain-language observations as you go. The app adds reminders, a widget, a lock, and sync across your own devices. Use whichever one you will actually keep up.

References

Beck, A. T., Rush, A. J., Shaw, B. F., & Emery, G. (1979). Cognitive therapy of depression. Guilford Press.
Greenberger, D., & Padesky, C. A. (2016). Mind over mood: Change how you feel by changing the way you think (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D. A., Schwarz, N., & Stone, A. A. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method. Science, 306(5702), 1776–1780. doi.org/10.1126/science.1103572
Kanter, J. W., Manos, R. C., Bowe, W. M., Baruch, D. E., Busch, A. M., & Rusch, L. C. (2010). What is behavioral activation? A review of the empirical literature. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(6), 608–620. doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2010.04.001
Korotitsch, W. J., & Nelson-Gray, R. O. (1999). An overview of self-monitoring research in assessment and treatment. Psychological Assessment, 11(4), 415–425. doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.11.4.415
Shiffman, S., Stone, A. A., & Hufford, M. R. (2008). Ecological momentary assessment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 4, 1–32. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.clinpsy.3.022806.091415

Helpful links

Educational content, not medical advice or a substitute for professional care. Ready to try it? Open the free worksheet, print a sheet, or get the app for iPhone and iPad or Android.