Treat sleeping differently from other activities

In response to the "Make it easier to track how much sleep I got last night" thread and my own "Visualize performance in a weekly report" thread, I would like to suggest sleeping to be treated as a 'special' kind of activity. My reasoning for this is as follows:

1. Tracking how much you sleep cannot be done completely satisfactory by just shifting the start of your day, as suggested in the "Make it easier to track sleep" thread.

In order to track your daily activities, ideally you would want your day to start and end in the middle of your sleeping pattern, so that in all but the most extreme cases all your activities will be in the correct day. For me that would be around 5am. I very rarely go to bed after 5am and I very rarely get up before 5am.

However, if you also want to track your sleep you want to keep the time that you slept *consequently*. So what you want is to put one patch of sleeping into one day. This can only be achieved by putting the start and end of your day outside of your sleeping range. But that's exactly what you don't want to do, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph. So basically you want to put it at the start or end of your sleeping patch.

But! If you want to track your sleep it means your sleeping pattern is likely to be irregular. Otherwise, why would you want to track it? So, what I'm saying here is that it is impossible to get both all your activities from one day into one 'Bubble Timer day' *and* get your full sleeping patch into one 'Bubble Timer day'. Thus I would like to see the 'Sleeping' activity be treated differently in that its totals are calculated differently (e.g. by shifting the range over which you total by 12 hours).

2. Sleeping is not really an activity.

Most of your goals are things you need to work for, things you need to get done, things that will make you money, etc. Whereas sleeping is very important, it is a *preparation* in order to be able to get those other goals running. It is not really a goal onto itself, it is a requirement to be able to get those 'real' goals finished. So whereas having a regular and satisfactory sleeping pattern is a worthy goal, I think it is very different from the 'normal' goals.

3. Coloring sleep as a normal activity in a performance graph would be just weird.

As I mentioned in the 'Visualize performance' thread, I would like to be able to see my performance through the hours of the day or the days in the week. What I want to see is a red color where I was unproductive, and a green color where I was productive. If I set sleeping as a goal, which I would very much like to do, it would mean that whenever I'm sleeping that would be colored green and thus be shown as a 'productive time'. Sure, sleeping is certainly not bad for me, but it's kinda weird to show it as a time of great productivity. No, it is not a great time of productivity. It's a time where I'm preparing myself to be productive in the day after. Besides... it also takes a lot of time to sleep, so if I put all my sleep in green, half of my green would be sleeping.

To summarize: I would love to see the following features in Bubble Timer:

1. A special activity called 'Sleeping' that would be 'locked' in a way, so that Bubble Timer knows this is the Sleeping activity. One should be able to show or hide this activity, so that people who don't want to track their sleep are not bothered by it.
2. This activity would total its hours differently from the other activities, so that it would be able to track totals for *consecutive* sleeping patches.
3. This activity could be visually distinguished from other activities by putting it at the top or bottom of the activities list, and in a different color for example.
4. In the visualized performance graph (left graph in this picture: http://s3.amazonaws.com/satisfaction-...), sleep would show up not as red, grey or green, but for example as blue or purple, so it is easily distinguished from the rest.

The advantages to this are the following:
1. I can easily track how much sleep I'm getting from day to day. One night of 4 hours followed by one night of 10 hours, would be correctly identified as 'not great', unlike when I use a day cycle from 5am to 5am, it could very well be that I got 7 hours of sleep in both days.
2. In the performance graph I will also be able to distinguish easily between sleep and 'real' productivity.
3. I could easily notice relations between days with lack of sleep and lack of productivity in the day following it.
4. I can act accordingly by paying more attention to my sleeping habits.

The one disadvantage is probably that it will take some figuring out to get this feature implemented in a no-more-settings way, while keeping it unobtrusive for those who don't want to use the feature.

Note: In case you were not yet convinced about the x hours +/- y hours goals, sleeping is for me *THE* activity I would like to use this kind of goal for. I want to sleep at least 7 hours, but I don't want to sleep longer than 8 hours, so I would set this goal as 7.5 hours +/- half an hour.