Activity monitoring, ready to hand out

Activity Record is an hour by hour activity diary, built for the activity monitoring used in CBT and behavioral activation. Clients note what they did, rate a feeling they choose, and can add pleasure and mastery. It is free on paper, in a browser, and on iPhone, iPad, and Android, and nothing a client records is ever sent to us.

What it is for

It does one job, activity monitoring, which keeps it simple to hand out and lets it fit alongside whatever else you are doing. In their 2010 review of behavioral activation, Kanter and colleagues describe monitoring as assessment with two main functions: a baseline of activity and mood to inform later work, and a way for clients to see in their own record that activity and mood are related. A record kept over several weeks also shows avoidance, where pleasure and mastery turn up, how broad or narrow the week is, and how later weeks compare with earlier ones.

Clients can keep it going while you work on activity scheduling, avoidance, behavioral experiments, or cognitive work, so the record reflects those weeks too. The scheduling and the experiments themselves stay with your usual methods and forms.

Three ways to keep it

On paper

The printable sheets cover one day hour by hour, or a full week on a single landscape page, with columns for the activity, a feeling, pleasure, and mastery on a 0 to 10 scale. They are free to print and copy for your clients.

In a browser

The online worksheet needs no account and no install. It saves in the browser on the client's own device, builds an intensity map as they go, and writes short plain-language observations once there are enough rated hours. It is the quickest way to try the format in session.

In the app

The app adds up to twelve daily reminders, which can open straight to the current hour, a home screen widget, an optional lock, and sync through the client's own iCloud or Google Drive. It is in English and Spanish.

What you get back

A client can export a PDF of a single day or any date range. Each day lists the hours with the activity and each rating. The report can include an intensity map for each rating, a grid of hours by days where the color deepens as the rating rises. It can also include the written observations: times of day, days of the week, activities grouped by the words used, and a comparison with the previous week. The observations are descriptive by design. They report what was recorded and stop short of interpretation, which is left for the two of you.

A CSV export gives one row per logged hour with the date, hour, activity, note, the feeling followed and its rating, pleasure, mastery, and any other feelings noted. Ratings in the CSV are always on the 0 to 100 scale, even when a client has chosen to see and enter them on 0 to 10.

Setting it up with a client

1. Choose the feeling together. The one most worth understanding right now. There is no default in the app or the worksheet, so the choice is deliberate. Clients can write their own word.
2. Decide on pleasure and mastery. Both are off by default. Turn them on if you want the record to show where enjoyment and achievement turn up, as on Beck's original form, or leave them off if one rating is enough to start.
3. Agree on the scale. 0 to 100 is the default. The 0 to 10 option, in the app's Settings or the worksheet's Scale control, matches many pleasure and mastery worksheets, and some clients find it easier.
4. Agree on when to log. Close to the hour where possible, with reminders at the times that fit their day. For hours that get missed, walking back through them in order later is an acceptable fallback.
5. Agree on what comes back. A PDF by email or on paper, or the app open in session. The client decides what to share.

Words you can give a client

Each hour, write a few words about what you were doing, and rate how strong the feeling was on the scale we agreed. If you are also rating pleasure and mastery, pleasure is how much you enjoyed the hour and mastery is how much it felt like an achievement, given how things are for you right now. Rate the hour, not the day. Blank hours are fine. Please don't tidy it up for me. The ordinary hours are as useful as the hard ones.

Privacy

There are no accounts and no servers. Nothing a client types in the worksheet or the app reaches us, so there is no data held by us to request, disclose, or lose. The worksheet stores the record in the client's browser, where it can be cleared by the browser itself, so clients keeping it over weeks should download the backup file now and then. The app stores the record on the device, and optional sync uses the client's own iCloud or Google Drive account. What a client exports and shares with you, and how you keep it, falls under your own practice's policies. The details are in the app privacy policy and the website privacy policy.

What it does not do

It records hours as they happen or shortly after. It does not plan activities or set up behavioral experiments. It contains no standardized measures, so outcome tracking with instruments such as the PHQ-9 stays separate. There is no clinician dashboard and no way for us to share a client's data with you, by design. It is not suitable for monitoring risk.

Background

The Learn section has short, cited articles you can pass to clients, starting with how to keep an activity diary and pleasure and mastery. The research page summarizes the evidence for activity monitoring and behavioral activation, including Kanter and colleagues' review of the techniques, with full references.

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