It recently occurred to me that I have, at one stage or another, used tech to track almost every aspect of my life.
There’s the fitness app where I can enter every morsel of food that passes my lips, so that it can tell me not only if I’ve consumed an okay amount of calories, but also if my protein-to-fat-to-carb ratio is, erm, acceptable.
There is the app keeping a log of how many steps I’ve walked each day, how many minutes I’ve exercised, how often I’ve stood and my heart rate.
When I got into running (read: slow jogging), I used an app (naturally) to track my route on a map, how long I took to get around said route and the average speed of each leg.
Sleeping enough has never been my strength, so I went through a phase of using an app that will monitor the different phases of your sleep if you put your device under your pillow. I even once tried out an app that tracked… hmm. No. Let’s not go there.
Safe to say, when it comes to physical fitness, tech has got us covered. But it doesn’t stop there; developers are also getting in on our mental health and wellbeing. If you want to track your mood, there’s an app - or 10 - for that. Now, there’s even a new tracking service in town made just for teachers, designed to help track our workloads.
Sliding scale
Straight away this interested me: how could workload be tracked? Surely just the number of hours of work wouldn’t be enough? It turns out the developers of fit2teach are, indeed, much more thoughtful than me. Each day you have to agree with a number of yes/no statements, such as “Had a photocopier nightmare” and “I did school work at home this evening.” By recording your responses, it calculates a score rating your work-life balance on a scale, from -100 to 100. You can expect daily, weekly, monthly and yearly scores.
I’ve tried it out and I find it interesting, although I have to admit that I’m a bit hit and miss with things that aren’t tracked automatically - I forget to do it.
However, I can see that, if done regularly, you could potentially spot some patterns to help you make better choices to improve your work-life balance. For example, certain days of the week might score lower for you. Why might this be?
On an even more basic level, though, using fit2teach helps you to reflect on your day and potentially brings a greater level of awareness about what to your day has been like. For me, whether you use tech to record it or not, by just considering the questions and not getting too hung up about your daily score (that’d just make things worse), you could begin to make improvements to your overall work-life balance.
Give it a go for free by visiting fit2teachapp.com.
Claire Lotriet is a teacher at Henwick Primary School in London. She tweets @OhLottie and blogs at clairelotriet.com
