For the majority of the fall Carly and I have been on opposite coasts as we flip flopped between our NY and LA offices. Today, we were catching up and making plans for the future. We stumbled into the topic of what health related things we have been working on. Carly is the one who opened my eyes to the usefulness of using apps to track and motivate our journey to improved wellness, more than 2 years ago
She turned me on to myfitnesspal at the beginning of my gluten-free experience, as a way to track my calories and macro-nutrients and to gain a few pounds in the process. Fitbit remains my favorite Carly-inspired purchase.
So it turns out that we have been doing two nearly identical things to be healthier and we have come at it from very different directions. We are both drinking more water and we are both doing more body weight exercises.
The cool thing is that we are using wildly different triggers to initiate action. Carly is using technology, while I have been utilizing location-based triggers.
Both of our styles fit our personalities. Carly thrives on things I could probably benefit from but don’t always emphasize because I have other methods. She is a master of routine, systems, and documentation. Using apps and technology gives her instant ability to log and track what is going on. There is also the possibility of setting reminders and seeing charts and graphs, which work well for her. She has a water-drinking app that lets her quickly log how much water she drinks when she does it and as she advances toward her goal there is a cool graphic. Her exercise app gives here a type of exercise and a number every day. She doesn’t have to think about it. It shows up and she has enough confidence in the app that she just does it.
I, at least for my healthy habits, tend to not use the real-time tracking of what’s going on (other than for my runtracker app). I have really been focusing on linking my activities with locations, and to a lesser extent, pairing common actions with new actions (i.e do my journal as soon as I brush my teeth in the evening and having a glass of water every time I think about eating). This has led to Madison Square Park being my trigger for lunges, the scaffolding in from of my office is the trigger for pull ups, the washing machine being my trigger to go do deadlifts (because the exercise room is next to the laundry room). My water routine is just to have a glass of water every time I think about food. It’s great. Note: Drinking the water isn’t meant to replace eating, although it could if one had the goal of losing weight, it just is a cue that I notice and it incites me to action.
A question for me to answer is, does this idea fit into any of the things I want to write about in the book? The answer is yes. It will fit nicely into a section that I have been writing on teams called, “Team members don’t need to be people.” Thanks, Carly, for being a human part of the team.
She turned me on to myfitnesspal at the beginning of my gluten-free experience, as a way to track my calories and macro-nutrients and to gain a few pounds in the process. Fitbit remains my favorite Carly-inspired purchase.
So it turns out that we have been doing two nearly identical things to be healthier and we have come at it from very different directions. We are both drinking more water and we are both doing more body weight exercises.
The cool thing is that we are using wildly different triggers to initiate action. Carly is using technology, while I have been utilizing location-based triggers.
Both of our styles fit our personalities. Carly thrives on things I could probably benefit from but don’t always emphasize because I have other methods. She is a master of routine, systems, and documentation. Using apps and technology gives her instant ability to log and track what is going on. There is also the possibility of setting reminders and seeing charts and graphs, which work well for her. She has a water-drinking app that lets her quickly log how much water she drinks when she does it and as she advances toward her goal there is a cool graphic. Her exercise app gives here a type of exercise and a number every day. She doesn’t have to think about it. It shows up and she has enough confidence in the app that she just does it.
I, at least for my healthy habits, tend to not use the real-time tracking of what’s going on (other than for my runtracker app). I have really been focusing on linking my activities with locations, and to a lesser extent, pairing common actions with new actions (i.e do my journal as soon as I brush my teeth in the evening and having a glass of water every time I think about eating). This has led to Madison Square Park being my trigger for lunges, the scaffolding in from of my office is the trigger for pull ups, the washing machine being my trigger to go do deadlifts (because the exercise room is next to the laundry room). My water routine is just to have a glass of water every time I think about food. It’s great. Note: Drinking the water isn’t meant to replace eating, although it could if one had the goal of losing weight, it just is a cue that I notice and it incites me to action.
A question for me to answer is, does this idea fit into any of the things I want to write about in the book? The answer is yes. It will fit nicely into a section that I have been writing on teams called, “Team members don’t need to be people.” Thanks, Carly, for being a human part of the team.
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