A few years back, I had some free sessions with a personal trainer at my gym, and one of the most useful takeaways was this:
Unless you write stuff down, it’s too easy to “fudge the facts” in your mind. How much pushups are you doing with good form? What are you eating each day? We tend to maximize the former, minimize the latter, and that’s not good.
For starters, he made me write down each day *everything* I ate and drank, along with estimated calories associated with each thing I put in my mouth. Boy, that was a depressing but enlightening shocker!
Well, I decided to go one better and start my own personal health chart (in Excel), daily noting my progress on several fronts (weight, body fat percentage, pushups, etc.). Alas, after a few months, that kinda fell by the wayside, so I picked it up again a year later. And, once again, that only lasted a few months.
I’m trying yet again, and—now that I have the regular routine of a full-time job—I’m hoping it’ll somehow be easier to keep up the list. For the very curious, I’ve included below exactly what I’m measuring:
- E-mails still in my inbox
- Body weight
- Body fat percentage
- Pushups (#)
- Various medicines (e.g., remembering to use Nasalcrom, an allergy medicine)
- Meditation (in minutes)
- Stretching (yes/no)
- Aerobic exercise (minutes)
- Strength training (minutes)
- Mood (1-10, 1 being suicidal, 10 being euphoric)
- Mood jot (my mood in a few words… e.g. “Overwhelmed and frustrated” or “Optimistic and excited”)
- Sleep (time I went to bed, time I got up, total hours of estimated actual sleep)
- Notes (what I accomplished that day, major challenges facing me, etc.)
* * *
In looking over my previous efforts, I’ve noticed the following:
- My weight seems to increase the day or two after working out.
- Eating massive huge fatty meals seems to reduce my weight in the short term (!?)
- I tend to be overwhelmed/stressed more than I thought I was.
- My sleep patterns are more erratic and less healthy than I assumed.
- Surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be a strong correlation between getting lots of sleep and feeling less tired the next day.
- After gaining nearly 10 pounds at Google and then losing those same 10 pounds, I’m now about where I was weightwise a year or two ago (still about 15 pounds to go!)
* * *
Have you kept your own “metrics journal”? What are some of the things you have measured? Observations? And did such a journal help you reach goals?
Sunday, November 26, 2006
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Saturday, November 25, 2006
More photos: From Gregarious Greeks to a Korean Combo and beyond...
I’ve had the good fortune to travel a lot over the last years (mostly for fun, not business, though that’s shifting) and also am blessed with many fun and photogenic friends.
With no further ado, here’s a sample of photos I’ve recently uploaded:
Talented Tjapukais
A sexy swing dancer
Watery wires
Korean combo
Gregarious Greeks
A fab flower
Here's the entire list of my photo sets on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thatadamguy/sets/
Enjoy, and comment away! :-D
With no further ado, here’s a sample of photos I’ve recently uploaded:
Talented Tjapukais
A sexy swing dancer
Watery wires
Korean combo
Gregarious Greeks
A fab flower
Here's the entire list of my photo sets on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thatadamguy/sets/
Enjoy, and comment away! :-D
Sunday, November 12, 2006
I'm staking a claim to Web 4.0!
Okay, I admit it. I missed the boat and jealously hollered that naming anything Web 2.0 is a bunch of crap. So more recently I thought, hey, that’s no problem, I’ll just glom onto Web 3.0, the semantic Web. I mean, look, I have lots of nice Jewish programmer friends, so who am I to be anti-semantic?!
But dammit, then I discovered that Nicholas Carr has already laid claim to Web 3.0! The bastard!
Never fear, dear BLADAM readers… I have the solution! I am hereby claiming as my own Web 4.0… with t-shirts and stickers, special edges, an expensive conference, and a network of blogs.
Yes, yes, I hear your skepticism already: So, Adam-you-total-killjoy-smartass, pray tell us… what exactly is Web 4.0? Well, I thought you’d never ask! Allow me to explain this scintillating new Web with crystal clarity.
Web 4.0 involves two-way individually-aggregated communal infocommerce predicated upon the six human senses! Sure, smell-o-vision may have crashed and burned, fine, maybe that tactile mouse thing never took off… but all of it combined? And tied to the Web? Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be big.
SMELL the Web. FEEL the Web. TASTE the Web (actually, this part includes just LICK until 4.1, but that’s a mere troublesome tribble). Imagine a wackypedia entry with which you can SMELL Detroit! Imagine your favorite mapping service applied tactilely to
But I’m not stopping there. I’m also trademarking the following:
- Television 4.0 (2.0 clicked with the remote)
- Medicine 4.0 (Viagra lifted it up to 2.0)
- Philosophy 4.0 (Exiting the cave was 2.0)
- Air travel 4.0 (Southwest is 2.0!)
- The Law 4.0 (The McDonald’s Coffee heated things up to 2.0)
and
...wait a minute? What’s that you say? We never really did refer to any of these things as 2.0? No one has ever blathered on about whether Jet Blue qualifies as part of Air travel 2.0? Or whether a doctor is adhering to Medicine 2.0 principles? (maybe if he has—snort—well-rounded edges and listens to his patients?). Hmm… how about “My new Sony is so Television 2.0!” No? It just sounds silly and goofily arbitrary?
No matter! If my 4.0 schwag is really hip and if I can get enough bloggers to BlogOn!(tm), we can make this a true movement with all 0.0000037% of the world’s citizens who are also nomenclature-obsessed-geeks. Our numbers may be small, but we’re powerful… just look at our Alexa graph, babeeee! You dare compete with that? ;-)
But dammit, then I discovered that Nicholas Carr has already laid claim to Web 3.0! The bastard!
Never fear, dear BLADAM readers… I have the solution! I am hereby claiming as my own Web 4.0… with t-shirts and stickers, special edges, an expensive conference, and a network of blogs.
Yes, yes, I hear your skepticism already: So, Adam-you-total-killjoy-smartass, pray tell us… what exactly is Web 4.0? Well, I thought you’d never ask! Allow me to explain this scintillating new Web with crystal clarity.
Web 4.0 involves two-way individually-aggregated communal infocommerce predicated upon the six human senses! Sure, smell-o-vision may have crashed and burned, fine, maybe that tactile mouse thing never took off… but all of it combined? And tied to the Web? Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be big.
SMELL the Web. FEEL the Web. TASTE the Web (actually, this part includes just LICK until 4.1, but that’s a mere troublesome tribble). Imagine a wackypedia entry with which you can SMELL Detroit! Imagine your favorite mapping service applied tactilely to
Pamela Anderson’s cleavage
But I’m not stopping there. I’m also trademarking the following:
- Television 4.0 (2.0 clicked with the remote)
- Medicine 4.0 (Viagra lifted it up to 2.0)
- Philosophy 4.0 (Exiting the cave was 2.0)
- Air travel 4.0 (Southwest is 2.0!)
- The Law 4.0 (The McDonald’s Coffee heated things up to 2.0)
and
...wait a minute? What’s that you say? We never really did refer to any of these things as 2.0? No one has ever blathered on about whether Jet Blue qualifies as part of Air travel 2.0? Or whether a doctor is adhering to Medicine 2.0 principles? (maybe if he has—snort—well-rounded edges and listens to his patients?). Hmm… how about “My new Sony is so Television 2.0!” No? It just sounds silly and goofily arbitrary?
No matter! If my 4.0 schwag is really hip and if I can get enough bloggers to BlogOn!(tm), we can make this a true movement with all 0.0000037% of the world’s citizens who are also nomenclature-obsessed-geeks. Our numbers may be small, but we’re powerful… just look at our Alexa graph, babeeee! You dare compete with that? ;-)
Friday, November 10, 2006
Gmail user? The new "murder," er, "mute" function will have you crying tears of joy
Lots of folks have noticed that five very cool new features debuted today in Gmail:
1) Enhanced UI, with Reply and other handy features placed at the top of conversations.
2) Notification when new messages have been made in the conversation since you started drafting your reply.
3) Forward an entire conversation (all messages).
4) Send chat messages to your friends using Gmail chat or GTalk even when they’re offline (the messages’ll be held for them).
5) Get Gmail on your mobile phone with a rich app (not just slow Web pages).
[Read more about these new gmail features]
But what I have to share with you is even more deliciously glorious… especially for those of you who are on lots of mailing lists or who have boring (albeit perhaps well-meaning) friends who just won’t shut up.
Friends, Romans, fellow GMail users… I introduce to you…
MURDER!
Oh wait, that’s not exactly right. Officially, the new feature is called Mute Thread, or “Mute” for short. Here’s how it works:
THE OLD WAY:
1) You’re reading some posts about the elections.
2) You were once excited about reading this stuff.
3) But at least one conversation is now on its 471th message. You keep hitting Archive but the damn conversation keeps popping up every time someone makes a new post!
4) You’re ready to tear out your hair. The posters’ hair. Your keyboard’s hair. Er, keys.
5) MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP, PLEEEEEASE!
THE NEW WAY:
1) You get yet another annoying message in the same damn conversation that’s already been conversed to death.
2) You press the ‘m’ key. Unless a message is written *directly* to you (e.g., your name is in the TO spot), you’ll never see that message in your inbox again!
In short, the Mute feature enables you to tell Gmail: “Archive this conversation AND all future posts in it… just have ‘em skip the inbox!”
[See official Gmail info on Mute]
I can think of only one downside to this feature at the moment:
If you filter your discussion list mail into separate labels (say, “Prolific Politics List”) and already have those posts skip the inbox… then the M key will sadly have no effect. It doesn’t remove labels, it just creates a “get out of inbox free”
But that aside, I think this is a super-awesome feature, and one that—to my knowledge—is unique amongst major Webmail providers.
So, go ahead, indulge in those high-traffic lists again. And don’t hesitate to threaten any annoying poster, “Dude, if you write one more word about Rummie, you’re getting SO m’d!”
DISCLAIMERS: I work for Google. I am not on the Gmail team.
1) Enhanced UI, with Reply and other handy features placed at the top of conversations.
2) Notification when new messages have been made in the conversation since you started drafting your reply.
3) Forward an entire conversation (all messages).
4) Send chat messages to your friends using Gmail chat or GTalk even when they’re offline (the messages’ll be held for them).
5) Get Gmail on your mobile phone with a rich app (not just slow Web pages).
[Read more about these new gmail features]
But what I have to share with you is even more deliciously glorious… especially for those of you who are on lots of mailing lists or who have boring (albeit perhaps well-meaning) friends who just won’t shut up.
Friends, Romans, fellow GMail users… I introduce to you…
MURDER!
Oh wait, that’s not exactly right. Officially, the new feature is called Mute Thread, or “Mute” for short. Here’s how it works:
THE OLD WAY:
1) You’re reading some posts about the elections.
2) You were once excited about reading this stuff.
3) But at least one conversation is now on its 471th message. You keep hitting Archive but the damn conversation keeps popping up every time someone makes a new post!
4) You’re ready to tear out your hair. The posters’ hair. Your keyboard’s hair. Er, keys.
5) MAKE IT STOP! MAKE IT STOP, PLEEEEEASE!
THE NEW WAY:
1) You get yet another annoying message in the same damn conversation that’s already been conversed to death.
2) You press the ‘m’ key. Unless a message is written *directly* to you (e.g., your name is in the TO spot), you’ll never see that message in your inbox again!
In short, the Mute feature enables you to tell Gmail: “Archive this conversation AND all future posts in it… just have ‘em skip the inbox!”
[See official Gmail info on Mute]
I can think of only one downside to this feature at the moment:
If you filter your discussion list mail into separate labels (say, “Prolific Politics List”) and already have those posts skip the inbox… then the M key will sadly have no effect. It doesn’t remove labels, it just creates a “get out of inbox free”
But that aside, I think this is a super-awesome feature, and one that—to my knowledge—is unique amongst major Webmail providers.
So, go ahead, indulge in those high-traffic lists again. And don’t hesitate to threaten any annoying poster, “Dude, if you write one more word about Rummie, you’re getting SO m’d!”
DISCLAIMERS: I work for Google. I am not on the Gmail team.
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