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

Clients record what they did each hour, alongside the feeling they are following and, if you choose, pleasure and mastery. That gives you a week or more of their actual days to work from, rather than what they can recall in session.

In their 2010 review of behavioral activation, Kanter and colleagues describe two main functions for activity monitoring.

• A baseline of activity and mood to inform later work.
• A way for clients to see, in their own record, that what they do and how they feel are connected.

Over several weeks the record can also show avoidance, where pleasure and mastery turn up, how broad or narrow the week is, and how later weeks compare with earlier ones. The worksheet and app add intensity maps and plain-language observations, which make those patterns easier to see together.

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. They have columns for the activity, a feeling, pleasure, and mastery, rated 0 to 100 or 0 to 10.

They come as printable or fillable PDFs in English and Spanish, and 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, and each one can open straight to the current hour. It also has 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. The report can include:

• Each day’s hours, with the activity and each rating.
• An intensity map for each rating, a grid of hours by days where the color deepens as the rating rises.
• Written observations on 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, feeling followed, 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. Pick the one most worth understanding right now. The app and the worksheet have no default, so the choice is deliberate, and 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 in Beck’s 1979 manual, or leave them off if one rating is enough to start.
3. Pick the scale. The default is 0 to 100. 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. Talk about when to log. Close to the hour is best, with reminders at times that fit their day. For hours that get missed, walking back through them in order later is a reasonable fallback.
5. Agree on what comes back to you. That might be a PDF by email, a printout, 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.

In a group

Activity Record has free group materials for a single session or a four-session series, in English and Spanish.

What members do

• Look back at one ordinary day, hour by hour.
• Notice where the feeling rose and fell.
• Build a menu of activities with the group.
• Plan something specific for the coming week, including what to do if something gets in the way.

The four-session series adds a week of planned activities, a session on what gets in the way, and a plan for low days.

What each guide covers

Timing, words you can use, discussion questions, and notes for inpatient units, intensive outpatient programs, substance use treatment, and outpatient groups. Each member gets a handout of their own.

Downloads

The PDFs are free to print and copy. The same materials are available in Spanish. For a series that carries one value through all four Everyday Insight tools, see the four-session skills group.

Privacy

There are no accounts, and no server of ours ever holds a record. 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, which can clear it, 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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