We're excited to introduce Trends and the Week View on the Context app. We designed these features to help you see patterns in your data and quickly understand what’s working, enabling you to make informed decisions with greater confidence.

Watch the Video

See me demo the new trend and week view features on the Context app so you can get started too!

Creating a Positive Feedback Loop

I adapted our feedback loop model from the OODA loop—a decision-making model often used in fields ranging from military strategy to cybersecurity. By simplifying this model, we’ve tailored it to support your daily decisions using the Context app:

1. Observe: Collect clear data about your behaviors and results.
2. Understand: Interpret what this data means for you.
3. Decide: Choose actions based on this insight.
4. Improve: Reflect on the effectiveness of your actions and adjust accordingly.

Our new tools primarily strengthen the first two steps—making decisions easier and improvements clearer. With continuous improvement built into the loop, you'll see ongoing refinement of your strategies, ensuring each decision you make gets progressively better.

Observe

High quality observations ultimately drive better decisions. Looking at the changes in your life that are highlighted by trends is one way to shorten the observation period needed to inform your decisions.

Understand

When you can orient your observations in a consistent way, it's a lot easier to process emerging data and understand what is going on. That's why I think visualizing your data on a spatio-temporal Timeline, like the one we provide on the Context app, is one of the most concrete ways to anchor your understanding. Then seeing a larger timespan with the Week View also makes it easier to see emerging patterns.

Decide

With better initial observations and understandings, you'll be in a much stronger place to make decisions when you bring this information to an expert like a coach or doctor or even an AI tool to help you figure out the best actions to take to get the outcomes you want. And it's self-reinforcing, in that you'll have better evidence of what works and what doesn't work because it'll be reflected in the data you continue to collect and in the trends that are highlighted.

Improve

That's why feedback loops are so powerful for decision-making and why I wanted to design these features to shorten the time necessary to “Observe” and “Understand” before being able to make good decisions. I believe that helping you create stronger feedback loops will help you discover the strongest levers to pull to improve your life faster.

Biohacker by Necessity

For the past two years, I've been a biohacker out of necessity, determined to uncover the root causes of my health issues. Just weeks after contracting COVID in May 2022, I was suddenly diagnosed with hypothyroidism, followed soon after by several other chronic conditions—all pointing toward perimenopause. I was just 39 at the time. This experience motivated me to experiment more with myself and reinforced the importance of advocating for myself with data.

This is why I designed the Week View and Trends with my team at Fulcra. I want to help people like me who are struggling with chronic conditions and just want to be heard so they can get better. Let me show you how I use the Week View to make observations and better decisions, followed by using Trends to check my progress.

Week View

The Timeline visually displays your data over time, helping you spot patterns. Switching from Day View to Week View enables easy comparison across multiple days and multiple data tracks at once, making it easier to spot meaningful changes.

I'm especially interested in checking my intuition about a particularly rough week. Selecting the Week View using the dropdown at the top summarizes each data track daily over seven days. Choosing a date in the picker displays that day plus the following six days. To examine my rough week (February 24th to March 2nd), I just need to select February 24th as the starting point.

This week’s summary is helping me remember what happened as I try to understand my data and look for patterns. I skipped my usual yoga session on Thursday due to a scheduled VC call and didn’t make time for other exercise. Thursday night, my sleep quality dropped— I got less deep sleep and REM sleep, likely from the anxiety I experienced later in the day. Missing my usual morning meditation on Friday compounded things, and my heart rate was elevated Friday and Saturday, suggesting my body was working hard to recover.

Decide

Observing these patterns helps me identify improvements:

Seek Advice

• Consult my coach, but come prepared with evidence and my own ideas to discuss during our weekly retro.
• Brainstorm new strategies with AI tools like ChatGPT to figure out how to optimize my morning and night routine.

Adjust Daily Routines

• Prioritize yoga, meditation, and sleep to maximize rejuvenation.
• Have a backup plan for yoga, like practicing at home with the Down Dog app.
• Choose lighter activities after getting poor sleep for faster recovery.

Clearly seeing the impact of my actions throughout the week motivates me to maintain beneficial routines. It's a good reminder to be deliberate about the practices that I've built for myself. Training my intuition over the past few years has increased my self-awareness and helps me experiment proactively.

Trends

Carousel on Home

When opening Context, Trends highlight the significant data changes, helping me quickly assess the effectiveness of my recent actions. Trends highlight these connections so I can act faster and more confidently.

My anxiety went up slightly, but I counteracted it by exercising and meditating more this week compared to the last.

Detailed View

Tapping on a trend in the carousel opens a detailed view with before-and-after charts, prioritized by the largest changes. Only significant trends (over 10% daily, 5% weekly) appear, based on the data tracks I have selected on Timeline so there's less noise and I’m only seeing the most important things first.

My sleep improved 6.5%, from 6h 55m to 7h 22m this week. My best night was on Sunday, probably because I burned a lot of calories that day at Body Pump. Checking my mindfulness sessions, I also see that I was even more consistent, going from 5 sessions up to 6 sessions.

Time Selector

Sliding across the time selector at the bottom of the screen highlights specific values on the charts. I’ve been getting better sleep on the weekends and less sleep in the middle of the week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights. There’s room for improvement to counteract my midweek dips.

Trends on Timeline

It’s also easy to view historical trends from the Timeline tab so I can look back at my trends on other days or weeks that I missed.

That’s how the Week View and Trends help close my feedback loops effectively!

Stay tuned—our upcoming annotation feature will make capturing meaningful observations easier than ever. Better context leads to better decisions, empowering you to confidently build the life you truly want.

Share Your Thoughts

We want to hear from you! Tell us your thoughts about your experience with the new Trends and Week View features, and what else you’d like to see.