Technology ramblings from a dilettante of all things digital

I did a test with a heart rate monitor.

Just working at my desk, I burn 181 calories an hour with an average heart rate of 72. If I use the elliptical, my I burn 267 calories with an average heart rate of 89.

That makes 79 extra calories

If i do it 4 hours a day, thats 344 extra calories, without changing my routine at all I can burn an extra 10.8 pounds a year

A while ago I had the idea about walking on a treadmill while working, then I saw a morning news segment about a study done by Dr. Levine, which is outlined here.  I have a nice Precor Treadmill at home, the 9.31,  and I use it almost every day which watching my latest Netflix rental and love it.  However, I don't think my boss would be too keen on me dragging it into work along with a matching TrekDesk.  Nor would I for that matter.  I like having it at home. 

And so began my search for a more practical option to burn calories at my desk.  I purchased the PC Gamer Bike Mini, a cool device that is basically the front half of a recumbent bike and you supply the back half with whatever chair you prefer, in this case being my office chair.  Its a pretty smooth motion and its not too difficult to use while working.  The two issues I noticed are

1. When doing thought intensive work, I occasionally wanted to stop and focus completely on the work at hand.  I didn't see a problem with this.  I'm not expecting to be working out every second I'm at my desk.  I'm guessing users of the treadmill desk would want a break from time to time as well.
2. On a normal height desk, while using the gamer bike, my knees go up too high and hit the underside of the desk.  I solved this by raising my desk up with four inch high spacers.

So this was a doable solution, but it was still a bit inconvenient to have to jack up my desk, especially at my current job where we all share a series of interconnected Ikea desks.  Raising it up would be very noticeable and annoying I'm sure.

So I needed a more practical solution.  While hunting around for a solution, I started looking at mini stepper machines, then eventually wound up buying a mini elliptical.  Current list price for it is $95.70 with free shipping.  The product seems to work pretty well overall.  However, while the motion keeps my knees lower, they were still grazing the underside of the desk.  After a little trial and error, I came across 2 motions that worked out pretty well.  The first was to have my knees point out to the sides and rest the outside of each foot on the elliptical pedal, and pedal that way.  The other way I came up with was to put my heels against the front lip of the foot pedal and pedal like a recumbent bike.  This way gives me a bit more of a workout and I usually take a break from it after 10 or 15 minutes.  Duct taping old insoles to the front lip made this a lot more comfortable on my heel.  The machine seems very quiet.  Coworkers sitting right next to me can't hear it and its not really noticeable that I'm using it.  This is nice because it doesn't reduce the appearance of professionalism in the workplace.  And for anyone that might be self conscious, they could use it without worry.

Conservatively, I can probably burn at least 100 calories an hour doing this.  So if I only do this for a combined two hours a day, that's 1000 calories a week.  In month, I could burn a pound and in a year, thats an extra 12 pounds at least.  I've only had it for about a month and I workout regularly in the morning as well.  I'm just hoping for a slight bonus with this.  That and, with my fidgety nature, I'll use it to some extent just because its there.

With so many people having desk jobs in today's society, for just $100 a person, I'd think this would be a good way for employers to combat obesity and health issues in their staff and possibly even lower their insurance premiums.  If anyone finds this information useful and uses this at their work or some other desk workout solution, I'd love to hear from you and see how it's working for you. 

The points I hope everyone takes away from this are:

1. It is possible to workout at your desk in a practical and cost efficient way without embarrassment.
2. I am a huge dork!

7 months later and I feel a lot more in control of my life, thanks to GTD and a little motivation.  I just finished David Allen's follow up GTD book, Making it all work.  I have to say that I highly recommend this book, even to those that have read Getting Things Done.  He doesn't modify the process at all, it's not about that.  Maybe I didn't pay enough attention when I first read (and by 'read' I mean I listened to the audiobooks 17 minutes at a pop during my commute), but this new book seemed to put it all into a better perspective.  The 6 horizons of focus (the name might seem a little froo-frooey, but they are very important) finally sunk in, from runway to 50,000 feet.  Although not a true GTD tool, I have adapted Remember The Milk (aka RTM) to the engine behind my GTD system.  I looked at the GTD contenders and have played around with most of them.

• Outlook I have to use for work and I believe it could be a great GTDish tool, but I don't really use it as such, so I just use the mail and calendar out of necessity for my job.  Don't get me wrong, I don't mind using it.  I use the Plaxo toolbar to sync all my outlook calendar items to my google calendar.
• Thinking Rock looks very cool and one of the new complete GTD systems, but it doesn't quite fit my lifestyle as it is a desktop app and I use multiple computers during the day, not to mention when I am on the go.
• Omnifocus looks cool.  It seems to also follow GTD very well from what I am told and has an iphone app, so its mobile, but the desktop app is for Mac and there's no web interface, so that one's out.
• Pen and Paper works, but I am too gadgety for that, although I do keep a pocketmod in my wallet in case of a planetwide EMP or zombie apocolypse (you never know).
• As I just mentioned above, Remember the Milk is how I roll for personal task management.  I was using todoist.com for projects.  I liked how you could reorder stuff easily, and then I would copy and paste from todoist over to RTM, but then I realized how crazy that was.  So just recently I took a commenter's suggestion and used RTM properly.  I have a few main lists:
  @action
  @blog (i may not keep this, I'm not sure yet)
  @someday
  @waitingFor
  Then each project becomes a list and tags are used for contexts.  I only have 3 contexts right now, because it should be as simple as possible:
  @home (i need to be home for this)
  @lunch (something I've deemed that I can knock out quickly over my lunch break and may require to be done during business hours (ie. doctor's appointment))
  @driving (something I have to drive to)
  @katieshouse (girlfriend honeydo list   )
  I made smartlists for @home and @lunch contexts since I use those all the time.
• For work, I use something called Abstractspoon Todolist for a couple of reasons:
  very fast with no lag time since its a simple desktop app
  easy note annotation with each task.
  each task can instantly turn into a project and get subtasks.  Sometimes I like to break down development efforts like this, so I can separate the planning and the doing.
  I can copy and paste a range from it into outlook, so I can do my weekly status reports with zero effort.
  it has tons of properties and filtering and sorting.  My big thing right now is at the end of the day, I categorize tasks as @today, so I can line up what I expect to accomplish the following day.  I find this is very helpful in staying organized and motivated me to get those tasks done by COB.  I've read that there's some mental commitment that happens when we put an item on a list and flag it with a due date, even if its self imposed.  There's a greater feeling of accomplishment when it gets done and a feeling of being jipped(sp?) when we don't get it done on time.  For my personal tasks, I only set deadline when something absolutely HAS TO get done by that date.  I've missed due dates for quite a while in RTM before I realized I set too many.  So now I just have my @action list filled and everything tagged by context.  Whenever I have some free time, I just go to the appropriate context and attack.  That way, I can be productive wherever I am and I never (reads: "rarely ever") feel jipped.

That's all I've got for now.  I feel pretty comfortable in my GTD setup.  I may streamline it a little over time.  Now I just need to get a little bit more motivated find some people to actually read my blog.

In today's world of missed deadlines, project cost overruns, missed new year's resolutions, pounds of fat not coming off and so on, it sometimes seems like the most truly awe inspiring a human being can experience or witness is someone actually meeting a goal or deadline.

I'm sure that's a rather unrealistically negative viewpoint, but that's how I feel sometimes.  I know I take on too much or set my schedules or deadlines too aggressive and so I suffer the consequences of missing it, and then in my mind its a failure, even if I did my best and actually was very heroic in my efforts to achieve what I was striving for.  When the finish line is way out of reach, its disheartening to know you can't reach it.  Conversely, if you set it too low, its actually better because you're more motivated since the end is in sight, you're much more likely to hit the goal and then you get that mental high of achieving the goal you set out for.

Anywho, that is what I'm focusing on more, lately.  My organizational system, using GTD is working well.  I just need to apply another spoonful of reality when setting schedules.  I tried this out recently when I fleshed out my 5 year plan.  We've all had that question in an interview: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?".

Well I sat down and tried to answer that.  I busted out a trusty Google spreadsheet, making a row for each goal.  A goal can be specific "Conquer Canada" or vague "get more better in shape".  Vague is fine here because we'll flesh out the milestones in a sec.  I then made columns for every month from 1-6, then every year from 1-5.  In each cell I set a specific goal for the 5 year mark, then filled out every cell before it starting at 1 month.  I went over them again and again until it looked like I had a REASONABLE set of milestone stepping stones to reach the lofty 5 year milestone.  Then I took the 1 month goals and either made them projects on my GTD projects list or put them straight on my Remember The Milk to do list.  I don't know about everyone else, but I feel like I have to constantly be improving myself, even if its just a little bit.  So every day I wake up, I've bettered myself from the day before.  Its like level grinding in real life, which was actually one of my favorite parts of Diablo 2.  (Sidenote:  I can't wait for Diablo3 and Starcraft2!  I think I may take a week of vacation time just to play them right release)