Every since I became a parent I learned that sleep is very precious and a good night’s sleep can be everything but a given.

There are a lot of “life hacks” out there you can search for how to sleep better or maximize zur sleep efficiency. Almost all of them just don’t take into account that people are not living isolated but have small children. For me those tips and tricks won’t help much. But what can help a lot is the knowledge of how last night’s sleep went. Could I sleep deeply? Did I wake up, but don’t remember it?

At first I bought the first Apple Watch to help me motivate myself to become more active and move more throughout the day (Hello, hourly reminder to stand up) and put it on the desk to charge overnight. A couple months in I heard about Apps for sleep tracking utilizing the watch to collect data. Already a sleep-deprived parent at the time I was immediately intrigued.

I tried many different Apps. Some didn’t record the sleep well enough, others needed to manually tap start and stop buttons whenever one goes to sleep or wakes up (something I regularly missed to do). But then came “Autosleep”.

Autosleep does not need to be installed on the Apple Watch. It is enough to install it on your iPhone. It works with data collected by your watch anyways and analyzes it. How you wear your watch and whether you would like to use your phone as an additional sensor lying on your bed are 2 of a handfull of parameters you can tweak to help the App making best possible sense of the collected data. After a couple of nights at most it should be fine and give good results. All you have to do then is go to bed wearing your watch and have data to explain why yo
u feel drained or full of power at a particular morning.

To keep my watch’s batteries level up I put it on the charger only during my morning routine after getting up and during my evening routine. After each of those it usually is back to 100%. If you had a more active day with workouts it might take a little longer – but in the evenings at home this isn’t an issue.

If interested, I suggest giving it a try: Autosleep