# Activity River: Visualizing Planned and Logged Personal Activities for Reflection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.01353 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01353/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Transforming Wearable Data into Personal Health Insights using Large Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06464/) (2024)
- [Reimagining Personal Data: Unlocking the Potential of AI-Generated Images in Personal Data Meaning-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18853/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Activity River, a personal visualization tool which enables individuals to plan, log, and reflect on their self-defined activities. We are interested in supporting this type of reflective practice as prior work has shown that reflection can help people plan and manage their time effectively. Hence, we designed Activity River based on five design goals (visualize historical and contextual data, facilitate comparison of goals and achievements, engage viewers with delightful visuals, support authorship, and enable flexible planning and logging) which we distilled from the Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction literature. To explore our approach's strengths and limitations, we conducted a qualitative study of Activity River using a role-playing method. Through this qualitative exploration, we illustrate how our participants envisioned using our visualization to perform dynamic and continuous reflection on their activities. We observed that they were able to assess their progress towards their plans and adapt to unforeseen circumstances using our tool.