My brother gave me a Fitbit One for my birthday back in August. I was initially skeptical about where or not I’d find it useful, and actually didn’t even start using it until 3 weeks ago. It’s an activity tracker, which essentially logs daily steps walked and stairs climbed using an accelerometer. It’s less accurate than GPS based apps such as RunKeeper, but the benefit is that you just keep in on a belt or in my case in a pocket, and it just passively logs what you do. And the USB-based rechargeable battery lasts about a week.
I was skeptical because while this type of information might initially be interesting, it doesn’t really serve much of a long-term purpose unless it changes behavior. And I didn’t think it could. But I was wrong.
Very quickly I realized that while I have a reasonably active routine — I run a few times a week and walk a few miles to and from work each day — there are some outlier days in which I don’t get much exercise at all such as a lazy Saturday or a rainy weekday when I take the train to work. I’ve stuck to the default daily goal of 10k steps (~4-5 miles), so on these days I’ve done something active to make sure I hit the goal. I also seem to be finding more excuses to go for walks to keep my daily averages high. I doubt I’ll use it indefinitely, but so far, I like it.
Here’s what the weekly summaries look like:
I crushed Dan (although he was on vacation this past week). The daily reporting is well done too, but I only found it interesting for the first week or so.