Tag: health

Yearly Theme Update & How I’m using Streaks to Stay on Track

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If hindsight is 2020, maybe 2020 wasn’t the best year to pick health as my yearly theme. Nevertheless, here we are.

I’m nearing my 4th month of working from home due to the pandemic, and the biggest lesson I’ve learned during those 4 months is just how easy it is to slip out of a routine.

Skipping things I didn’t pay much attention to, like my afternoon walk, now suddenly have an incredible power to spiral my default behavior right back to sitting on the couch if I’m not careful. At the same time, I’m also being mindful that it’s okay that I’m not performing at the levels I normally would. These, after all, are not normal times, and giving myself a break is necessary at times.

With that being said, my intention for this year was and still is to focus on my health. I’ve just had to readjust my expectations to effectively fight the gravitational pull towards my couch. For that, I’ve been taking a page out of the ideas in James Clear’s Atomic Habits and BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits and accepting that doing something regularly, even if it’s small, is better than doing nothing at all.

I’ve been using a combination of Apple’s Activity app and Streaks to set my goals. Using the Activity app’s trends tab, I set my goal to be only slightly above my average. If the app says I’m getting about 9 minutes of exercise a day, I’ll set my goal to 10.

Right now I have goals set in Streaks for “Move” calories, walking distance, stand hours, exercise, sleep, and meditation. Streaks syncs with Apple Health as well so the actual effort of tracking my goals is minimal, and because the goals themselves are only slightly more than what I usually do in a day, I’ve actually been meeting the goals almost every day. In fact, most days, I exceed them. Contrast this to a few weeks ago, when the idea of meeting any of them let alone all of them seemed out of reach – this is a win in my book.

Because I’m going off of the average trend, the goals feel achievable even on my worst days. More importantly, as the trend goes up, I’ve been incrementally increasing the goals (albeit slowly), which much to my surprise hasn’t felt as onerous as it had in the past.

Maybe, by the end of the year, I’ll be back up to where I’d hope to be, but for now, making progress a little at a time feels good. And feeling good is something we could all use a little more of right now.

Healthy Habits with Keyboard Maestro

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By this point, pretty much everyone knows about the dangers of sitting in front of a computer all day. Unfortunately, some of us work desk jobs and just don’t have a choice. Even more unfortunate is my tendency to forget to get up and move around unless I’m reminded. I don’t have an Apple Watch to remind me to move, and I’m hesitant to create too many alarms on my Fitbit Charge HR that might detract from my main reason for using alarms, medication reminders. Thankfully, Keyboard Maestro has saved the day once again.

Inactivity Reminders

A little over a year ago, I bought an app called Healthier. It’s a simple app that lives in your menubar reminding you to take a break by overlaying the screen after a time period of your choosing (between 10 and 90 minutes). Unlike most of the break reminders, you can override it so that it doesn’t prevent you from working when you’re in the zone, which I like.

I found having Healthier running all the time a bit too much though. For instance, if I’m in class, I can’t always get up to take a break as much as I’d like. Thanks to Keyboard Maestro, I was able to set up a macro to launch Healthier only when my Time Machine back up in my office is attached. This allows me to get reminders to get up when I really need them, sitting in my office, rather than all the time.

Note: If you don’t want to buy Healthier, and just want notifications or alerts to get up and move (without the screen overlay) you can also just use Keyboard Maestro to send you reminders periodically. Keep reading for more information.

Hydration Reminders

I’m terrible at remembering to drink water throughout the day. Even with a water bottle in front of me, I still forget, so you can bet I’ve spent a lot of time looking for the best app, water bottle, reminder – anything to remind me to drink water. None of the things I tried managed to stick though. It turns out Keyboard Maestro is perfect for this too (provided I don’t need reminders on my phone).

I have two separate macros enabled. The first sends me a notification reminding me to drink water every 45 minutes between 11 AM (when I’m typically done my morning coffee) and 4:30PM. The second is a bit more extensive, and actually prompts me to enter my how much water I’ve had and then enters it on the Fitbit website twice a day. (All I need to do is hit submit.) I have a tendency to forget to track my water intake, so this removes nearly all the friction of having to open the app or go to the website.

Mindfulness Reminders

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m fairly high strung and easily get worked up about things, so I’m trying to be better at staying calm throughout the day. There are plenty of mindfulness reminder apps available but most seem to rely on a chime of some sort. Since I normally keep my Mac muted at work, none of these really worked for me. Much like my hydration reminders, I set up a Keyboard Maestro macro set to remind me to take a deep breath every 90 minutes while I’m in the office.

Keyboard Maestro seems to be the app that keeps on giving, and keeping me healthy is just one more reason to love it.