Most mood trackers live inside an app, which means they also live inside the same phone that is already trying to steal your attention. James does the opposite. It is a small wooden box with four knobs and a single button, and it is one of the frictionless IoT devices I build for myself. It sits at the intersection of three things I keep coming back to: daily journaling, the quantified self, and tangible interfaces that ask almost nothing of you.
I do not need to sell anyone on journaling. We close the day, we replay what happened, we weigh the consequences of what we did, and we ask whether we ended up a slightly better person than we woke up. The problem is everything that gets in the way. Most people never find the time, the energy, or the stubbornness to keep a written diary going, and plenty have a quieter worry: they would rather not leave their private thoughts sitting on a page someone else might read. Yet even five honest minutes before bed, spent reflecting on the day and grading its different parts, pays off twice. It settles the mind for sleep, and it sets the tone for the next morning. And if you record those grades instead of letting them evaporate, you can look back and start seeing the correlations between events, feelings, frustrations, and motivation.
While doing this for a while, I noticed something: there is not one "me" keeping the diary. Several of us live in here, and they are different enough to be treated as separate people, each with its own weather system.
| The four "me" | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Physical me | How my body feels: its energy for action, aches and pains, mobility, flexibility, quality of breathing, how my senses meet the outside world. |
| Spiritual me | My moral and religious beliefs and the actions tied to them. The part that marks me as human and reflects my sense of belonging to a society, to humanity, to a clan, to a faith. |
| Emotional me | How I feel emotionally: happiness, motivation, hope, love, freedom, justice, gratitude, pride, a sense of safety. |
| Rational me | What I know and what I learn, by study or by experience. The whole of my knowledge, culture, education, and professional skill. |
Every day asks something of each one: take action, feed your beliefs, learn something, look after body and mind. The strange part is how independent they are. I can be physically wrecked and still feel completely at peace with humanity and my own ideals. I can be in perfect shape, satisfied, and motivated, and still know I quietly betrayed a principle that mattered and did nothing to sharpen my mind that day.
Nobody sits at the TOP of all four at once, and that is fine. But being able to see and grade them turns a vague mood into a lever you can actually pull. Run it with the people you live with and it becomes something more: a real opening to talk honestly with a partner and with your children.
The moment you put a number on each of these selves, you have made data, and data can be studied and used to get better. That is the whole reason James exists.
Using it takes a few minutes. I reflect on the day and how it touched each of the four, then I turn the four knobs to a value from 1 to 100 and press the button on top. The reading travels over WiFi as a small JSON record to a Firebase database, where it waits for me. Whenever I feel like it, I can pull up the history and watch how one self drags or lifts the others.
Because James gets passed around my family, each person has a little wooden avatar shaped like a chess piece. You set yours on top of the device before sending, an RFID tag inside is recognized, and the entry lands in your own table. A day looks like this:
"day":{"data":"20230322", "who":"Giovanni", "physical":70, "spiritual":82, "emotional":40 "rational":86}
For now I am still gathering readings and watching them grow on a web dashboard. But the dashboard was never really the point. The point is the ten minutes every night when my son and I compare our small evolutions, trade the day's experiences, and hand each other whatever we managed to learn.