Analysing Your Data
From: How-Tos & Guides
Your daily levels - mood, stress/zen, energy, and motivation - are helpful signals.
On their own, they let you better understand your well-being, and figure out where to focus.
When combined with blockers, they let you better understand, and diagnose, what's going on in your life.
In this guide, we cover:
1. Why use levels
2. How to read your levels
3. Typical causes
4. Analysing blockers
5. Combining levels and blockers
1. Why use levels
Use the four levels - mood, stress/zen, energy and motivation - to break down your general feelings.
Don't just think 'I feel good' or 'I feel bad'. Using levels lets you be more precise, and understand your well-being more accurately.
These levels represent four dimensions of mental, physical, and emotional health, as well as motivation, which vary for individuals on a daily, weekly, and even intra-daily basis.
Everyone's levels fluctuate based on their current work/life activities, their workplace culture, and their environment. Levels are also affected by patterns of activities, specific interactions, and daily events.
Regularly reflecting on these signals helps you become more in tune with your mind and body, as well as your mental outlook, capacity for work (or for putting effort towards personal and family life), and appetite for growth and action.
Reflecting on 'levels' in an objective manner helps reduce mental barriers you might have against thinking about how you feel.
The data itself is also useful, when you check-in over time.
2. How to read your levels data
Your daily check-ins give you a pattern of levels data, weekly, monthly and annually.
You can see your mood, stress/zen, energy and motivation over time in your Levell dashboard charts.
From your graph you can find out:
-
What your basic trends are, over that period
-
How volatile your mood, stress, energy and motivation are
-
Which levels move together, if any
-
If one of your levels is consistently lower or higher than the rest
Start by looking at the overall weekly picture. Are your levels overall high or low?
Then look at differences in patterns, on a weekly basis. Do you find one level or levels are higher or lower than the rest?
Finally, look at volatility. Are your levels pretty stable or varying considerably throughout the week?
You can also look at trends on a monthly or annual basis, to check whether your typical patterns have shifted.
This is a good exercise if you move jobs, switch projects, or make life change.
Resource: Typical combinations and what they might mean
Finally, you can use your levels trends to compare to activities, sleep, working hours, business events or even performance data.
Your trends charts can help you understand your well-being, but also what drives your well-being, and how your well-being impacts other things.
3. Typical causes
Causes of low levels can be split into four factors:
-
Lack of balance (between demands and resources, in your work, and across work and personal life, either during the day or as a result of insufficient rest period)
-
Lack of values alignment (between what you value, and your environment, processes or goals)
-
Uncertain or scary situations (causing the stress reaction, independent of issues to due with challenge or workload)
-
Lack of fulfillment (limited opportunities for work or life satisfaction, challenge, or opportunities for personal or professional growth)
Read more about these scenarios in our related resource.
4. Analysing blockers data
Blockers are anything that is stopping you from being or feeling at your best.
By analysing patterns in blockers, you can pinpoint the specific issue or combination of issues that is impacting your well-being on a day or day or week to week basis.
Because you've recorded these blockers as they happen, you get a more accurate picture of what's going on.
Guide: Using the blockers feature
Blockers can be grouped into key categories:
-
Personal non-work
-
Work demands and resources
-
Work environment, processes, policies and culture
-
Work relationships
First, look at whether your main blockers are work-related, or related to personal non-work.
If your main blockers are work related, are they related mostly to work demands and resources (indicating a lack of balance), or are they mostly related to relationships, or to other categories?
This tells you who might need to be involved in a solution, and where to focus your time.
On your dashboard, you can see trends in blockers over time in your graph.
Beneath your graph is a list of blockers by category, and a frequency count based on the number of times you've logged that issue as feedback.
Click through the categories to see the frequency counts, and identify the sub-categories that are most important. These should be your top priority.
Is it work prioritisation? Or team relationships? Or sleep?
Click on the details button to get more information on the context and root causes. Is it the same repeated issue or changing over time?
Example: My problem with diet is primarily due to the fact that I keep eating carbs, especially late at night, when I'm hungry, because I'm still working after I ate dinner a few hours before.
The detail tells you exactly where to focus to make the biggest immediate difference to your well-being.
5. Combining levels and blockers
The most powerful way of analysing your data on Levell is to combine levels and blockers charts.
Your levels tells you where to focus. Is it stress, energy, mood, or motivation? Is the issue volatility, or is it an overall low trend?
Your blockers tell you what the issue is by looking at, and breaking down, recurring patterns. In particular, it helps you separate work vs. personal non-work.
Try analysing your own data, and applying it to better understand yourself, and then choose a high-impact low-effort action.
Greater awareness is at your fingertips!
