My doctor suggested I work toward getting 10k steps daily. So today I created an autodialed steps goal powered by my Fitbit. I’m somewhat concerned that a goal like this may get tricky since it requires planning ahead at higher rates. I’m hoping I’ll be able to figure that out as things slowly ramp up. I have a treadmill I can use while working, but it’s hard to count those steps since my hands won’t really be moving while I’m working even if I’m using the treadmill.
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Figured out a solution for getting a step count while on the treadmill. I’m wearing the fitbit on my ankle. Seems to be working like a charm.
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Ha, I was going to suggest beeminding active minutes instead of steps, if you have a fancy enough Fitbit. I have the same problem with skating and biking not being steppy enough.
Active minutes is based mostly on heart rate, I think. Interestingly, Fitbit is pretty lousy at heart rate accuracy but for counting active minutes it doesn’t matter. It’s like, you have a beemergency to spend 60 minutes with elevated heart rate and the noisiness of Fitbit’s sensors means you might get lucky and and get credit for 60 minutes when you only actually did 55 minutes, or the other way around, but on average it’ll end up quite accurate despite the reading being something of a random number generator at any given moment.
That’s using Fitbit’s fancy metric that counts every minute with your heart rate at 104-126 bpm and every minute with your heart at at 127+ as two minutes. So I’m averaging 60 active minutes a day which is somewhere between 30 and 60 actual wall-clock minutes of elevated heart rate.
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Yup! I’ve been minding zone minutes since I got the fitbit. Steps will be a complimentary goal. I actually often enjoy having more than one goal that tracks the same general activity from different angles. I’m hoping I’ll have a similar experience beeminding both zone minutes and steps.
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I briefly considered buying a second Fitbit so I could wear one on my hip and one on my wrist while using the treadmill. However after some looking it appears Fitbit doesn’t support linking two Fitbits to the same account. So the general advice seems to be to take the device off the wrist, put it in clip mode, and stick it in my pocket.
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Awesome did not know y’all supported active minutes with Fitbit Integration! This could help me with me weight lose goal. As I have noticed I stay stagnant on my weight even when dieting if I don’t exercise.
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It’s been bumpy adjusting to the time change. It’s had me thinking more about ways I could improve how I wind down in the evenings. It’s one of those areas I’m a bit at a loss on how to manage effectively. I’m definitely at a far better place than I’ve been in the past, but there’s been a lot of compromise involved.
I’ve purchased a Withings scale to automate weighing in. Just waiting for it to arrive. I was getting annoyed at the friction of manually entering it in the Fitbit app.
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Slowly feeling better after the time change. Still waiting on the scale. Still skipping my medication on the weekends, so chilling the day away as usual.
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I detailed on my loona goal and therefore didn’t have beemergencies for ~2 days. Turns out I do indeed need the goal. I just ratcheted down and set the respite for that goal to 0.
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Past couple of days I’ve had a pretty gnarly work task, and I’ve been playing more with getting through it using journaling. Basically I have a page in Notion where I’m writing stream-of-consciousness my thoughts on the task as I work on it, including code snippets, query results, etc, etc. It feels good, probably because it allows me to iteratively work on a complex issue without trying to force the whole thing into my limited working memory.
In the past I’ve tried different variations of work journaling, but I’m beginning to think one reason they always failed was that I was trying to impose too much structure on myself. Though I know there were other issues, too, like perhaps just getting bored of it for example.
One thing that isn’t clear to me is how to best organize these journal entries. So far I’ve usually used a date-based structure, where each day gets its own page. But this feels like it works counter to the value I get from the system, since, for example with my current task, I’m working on it for multiple days, so it doesn’t make sense to break it up into multiple documents, one per day.
I’m wondering if what would work better would be just a simple list of pages, sorted by most-recent modification. That way pages for relevant tasks would remain near the top of the heap, and pages for tasks I no longer need to think about would naturally float down the stack.
At that point, though, how do I differentiate between this kind of journal and my existing autofocus systems which use a similar sorting strategy? Should I just start adding a free-form journal section to all my tasks in my different autofocus systems? Not yet clear to me. 
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I’m experimenting with updating the structure of my work journal in Notion to better match this experience:
I’ve created a new autofocus view on the journal. I added a hidden field for time of last edit. I’m sorting by this field descending.
I also grouped by this field, each group representing a single week.
I added parent-child fields which seems to be a new Notion feature I didn’t know about so I can create child pages.
And I intend to try naming my pages based on the task they represent rather than the day, though I may still create a page for the day itself to plan the day. I might just call these pages “Today” or something and not worry about actually using the date in the title anymore.
We’ll see how it goes.
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Ooh, does this refer to the Mark Forster system?
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Yup! Though I don’t adhere strictly to his formulation
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Work journaling is still helping quite a bit when I think to do it.
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Neither does he! Mark is an inveterate tinkerer. Every year he hosts a ‘Lenten challenge’ of using just one system, strictly, for the six week period just ended. He doesn’t always succeed in not changing the formulation or switching to another approach!
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Recently my parents finished moving out of the house where I’m currently living, so it’s now just me and my brother living here, and my brother does quite a bit of his own travel. That shift has reduced the amount of “ambient structure” in my life, meaning that things that used to be relatively automatic I’m now finding to be more challenging:
- Buying and preparing quality food.
- Eating at consistent times and not too much.
- Managing my personal hygiene (e.g., showering regularly, changing my clothes, etc).
- Keeping on top of all the various household chores (cleaning, maintenance, etc).
Of course, I could create a load more Beeminder goals to manage all this, but I feel like I already have a number of goals that can make it difficult to do my weekly beetuning / calendialing. So it’s been difficult for me to think about how to prioritize which goals will have the largest impact, and how to modify my environment such that some subset of these behaviors will happen relatively automatically.
I’ve observed for a long time that, all else being equal, I do significantly better living with other people than living alone–again largely due to the ambient structure.
- Dining being a social activity improves my eating habits.
- Knowing other people will have to put up with me improves my personal hygiene habits.
- Having built-in social interaction helps prevent me from becoming too isolated.
- Having other people to interact with and potentially do things with helps to somewhat temper my fixation on computers and technology.
- Assuming my housemates are relatively emotionally stable themselves, their presence provides a buffer against my own tendency to negative mood states.
However, I also know from hard experience that living with someone who is not emotionally stable and non-judgmental drastically increases the severity of my own symptoms, and in the past has driven me into severe anxiety and depression. So the thought of seeking housemates outside the 100%-safe circle of my immediate family is itself anxiety-inducing.
(My use of the term “emotionally stable” should probably be taken with a grain of salt. More than half of my immediate family also has moderate-to-severe ADHD which certainly comes with some emotional instability. So when I refer to the importance of emotional stability in the people who are close to me, I’m more referring to their ability to be emotionally safe and step back from the cliff when things get heated and allow time for gradual resolution. Basically my ADHD makes me really bad at emotional regulation so I need the people in my life to respect and cooperate with my use of healthy coping mechanisms.)
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I’ve created a new Beeminder goal–digidown–for turning off all electronic devices by 9:30pm each day. I’m hoping this will significantly help with my evening cooldown. I’m a bit cautious since similar attempts in the past haven’t gone well, but I’m hopeful this time will work better.
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My 9:30pm shutoff goal has been working very well, I’m hopefully it will continue. I think one reason it’s working better now than it has in the past is because currently my work allows me to entirely shut off my phone rather than, say, just putting it in another room.
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This sounds robust. Cold Turkey can also force-close your computer (Frozen turkey) for a certain time frame
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I’ve been working on getting in with a personal trainer to help stay on track with fitness and keep my weight in check. In addition, at the trainer’s advice, I’ve begun documenting what I eat (not calorie counting, just taking photos for now), and taking a 15 minute walk after each meal. I’ve created two beeminder goals to ensure I stay consistent with both behaviors.
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