Sunday, June 2, 2013

The fitbit, or "making me aware of all the exercise I'm not doing"

A friend of mine (hi Sabrina!) uses a Fitbit to track her daily activities. It's a little device that tracks your movement and gives you a simple overview of how active you are (or aren't.)

Now, I don't really believe that its calorie counting, stair counting and step counting is entirely accurate. It's just doing it based on an accelerometer and I've seen it occasionally double count walks. That's fine.

But what it does do is pretty nifty: it's reminding me of exactly how freaking inactive I am being a salaried computer programmer. I'm not spending an hour or two a day walking. I'm not really doing any kind of strenuous activity outside of occasionally going to the gym.

This thing reminds me with one simple number (or flower, if you like that kind of thing) exactly how inactive you are. And that to me is worth more than millions of lines of cute looking websites to track your daily progress.

So, now I have no excuse.
 

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