First Sleep Tracking Update - 30 Days of Data

Roughly one month into the sleep tracking experiment and we've had two major findings. The first finding is that self-reported data is flawed and inconsistent. I did not track my time daily and relied on the mobile app Lark to give me data. Ana only tracked her data for the first week and was almost always up on time and happy to be up. I think this was mostly the Hawthorne effect which I admit was partly my goal in getting her to track her sleep.

The other finding is that my sleep (as reported by Lark) is VERY erratic. In the first 30 data points (over 30 days because for some days I have missing data) I found that my average bed time was 12:35 AM. Some nights I was in bed as early as 10 PM while three nights I went to bed after 2 AM thanks to late night hockey (and going to the bar afterwards). My average wake time was 7:50 AM with many days getting up prior to 7 AM to get kids to hockey or school but sleeping in past 9 AM at least three times. And those three times do not align to the three times I stayed up late, with my average amount of sleep being 7:38 with a min of 4:21 and a max of 11:29. In further proof of the inconsistency, the standard deviation of my minutes of sleep per night was 98 minutes!

First Month's Conclusion: I would like to refocus the data collection of this experiment with more consistent data and attention to detail. I have convinced my older daughter, Cayla, to join us since all she has to do is install the Lark app to start getting sleep data. Ana is also going to install the App as a way to more easily track her data. And, as my other post I am putting up today on common problems with goal setting discusses, I am going to implement weekly family reviews of the sleep data provided by Lark to see how we are doing.