This free app allowed me to track everything I did for the past 4 years.

2020 looked different.

The Life Cycle app by Sleep Cycle AB (available on iOS) allows you to track your activities by using your geographical location. When used in conjunction with the the Health app and the more popular Sleep Cycle app (also on iOS), you can get a pretty good picture of your average day.

I have had this setup for the past 4 years (2017– present) and as such, I thought it would be interesting to share some of this data, with a special emphasis on contrasting 2020 with the previous years. To begin with, here’s a quick summary of my past 4 years:

I can’t quite describe the feeling that you get when you can see such a significant chunk of your life summarized into such pretty little graphs.

Just a quick glance at these graphs reveals that 2020 was quite different. As a student, I had been accustomed to going on campus almost every day for the past few years, however that ceased to be the case starting in around March 2020, when campus closed down. As a result, it appears that I spent about 29% more time at home or sleeping than previous years. I also walked 53% less steps than previous years, illustrative of the more sedentary lifestyle that I adopted as work from home became the new norm. This is even though I made it a point throughout the pandemic to take walks through my neighbourhood to stay in shape and get some sunlight, which is probably the main reason I have even that many steps to begin…