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mushroom comments on Happiness Logging: One Year In - Less Wrong
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I can confirm that doing this makes you less happy. Right now if you asked me whether I was happy, I'd say, sure, I'm happy. But if you asked me to make a 1-10 rating, I'd put it at maybe a 6. Well, that doesn't seem so happy anymore. It seems lacking relative to where I could be. Do this for a few days and you realize you're almost never at or near a 10. It's grinding, and your subjective experience of your life becomes defined, not just measured, by the happiness score.
What about alternate measures?
Binary comparisions like: "Would I rather: Experience the previous hour exactly as it occured a second time, or X for an hour?". Where X might be : sleep, or some reference experience.
The abscence of negative mood. This isn't the same as happiness, but something like boredom or anger could have a clearer floor, or lend itself to a "Present, a little, none" scale.
Or more specific questions. Here's a PDF of an adjective based scale. An idea is to pick out only those adjectives that you already expect to vary.
I think ordering/ranking experiences would be more successful (in general) than trying to just give them scores.
An example of such a system: Every ping asks you to briefly describe the previous hour, and then shows you a list of every other ping you've written for the last week/month or so. You then put the description wherever it fits in the list, above everything that was less fun to experience, and below everything that was more fun.
In this way it's very easy to notice happiness trends (whether or not you're getting happier or sadder over time) without worrying about associating the same activity with the same score, even if it's becoming less or more fun to do.
My worry in that case would be present conditions bleeding into the memory and evaluation of those earlier pings. For example, I'd expect that when you're hungry your relative ranking of past ping moments is going to change to more heavily weigh moments when you were eating.