Getting Analytics Is Cool

How much you walk each day is the testimony of how much fitness level you have. And the amount of food you eat directly affects your body size and shape. Also the athleticity of it. But still you gulp down that burger and large fries. And when you are at diet, you prefer diet coke.

Fitness is a big industry because it is easy to get bulky, huge with fat and become a gobble of space. And it is on extreme difficult level to shed those fats and gain strength. Training at the gym is a choice but it is expensive, scary and a long journey. Controlling your diet and doing body weight exercises are big no-no because you love your food.

So people make new year resolutions. And the top of the list for many people is going to gym. And sure they do go to the gym for 1 month and then boom. Suddenly all of them disappears.

 The motivation isn’t huge enough and the progress isn’t clear enough for them to continue. In exercise lingo, you had quit when you didn’t even started.

What if there was some magical pill which you can swallow and boom all your fitness problems gets solved. No more painful running on treadmill, watching your food and sacrificing on the delicious potato chips. Turns out there is such a thing – or to be correct such a thing is being marketed a lot. And probably you have one or thinking of buying one.

The Leisure Gift Card

Snehal was bored because the follow up task which she needs to do would take another hour. And she had nothing else to do – so she turned to the most easiest way to kill time. Enter Whatsapp – an app which was intended to use as a substitute to messages is being to used to spam people with unintended and unwelcomed messages.

After playing around the app for 10 minutes, she went on to the shopping website to surf and then added tonnes of things to the cart. And then gawked at them like a kid, saw the total money it would cost and then closed the window. No more window shopping, it hurts sometimes when you can’t afford.

Thinking about trivial things, getting upset and getting high – her mood swings were at the highest level. And then there was a sudden meeting announced. It was surprise hence no one knew about it.

All of them including Snehal were invited into the conference to announce a distribution of gift card which had some nominal amount in it. But for Snehal it was gold – she thought of all the things she could buy and then entered the gift card into the app.

And boom there she saw the amount and her eyes gleed. She was now looking at all the things which she won’t normally buy. Because it wasn’t her hard earned money, it was easy money. So she started looking at trending things and started adding them to the cart.

Not sure what to buy, she convinced herself that she needed the activity tracker which she thought would help her in staying fit. So that’s how she spent her leisure gift card.

The Activity

Next day, Snehal woke up excited to wear her activity tracker. Now she could see all of the things she did – how much she walked, how many calories she burned, how was her heart rate going on and many different variations.

Also, it would help her get notified about the calls and messages without using the phone. Such an upgrade and it made her feel cool – so it was a win-win bargain.

One month went by and Snehal still wore those activity tracker. But she didn’t lose any weight, gain any strength or become a fitness freak. She was just about the same – perhaps little more unhealthy because she ate a lot in the last week’s vacation.

What is going on here? Snehal did all the things she was advertised. She bought the latest activity tracker – the one with all the whistles and bell. And she wore them all day and also while sleeping so she can track sleeping pattern. But nothing really happened – can you guess why.

Action

No matter how much you take note of analytics – it is a fancy tool and nothing else. Unless you act on it.

Whether you wear activity tracker or not, you are going to walk 5 km everyday because of your routine. Activity tracker will help you when see the past week’s result and you improve – try to walk 1 more km. And then keep checking to make sure consistency is maintained.

If you are going to sleep on same time everyday then there is no use of seeing how is your sleep pattern. Go and experiment with time, sleep at 9, 10 and 11 at different days and check if your sleep pattern gets improved. Do more of such variations and boom you will have found your best sleep timing and then stick to it.

Another way to use analytics is to look for flaw. Say you don’t want to improve then it is fine to not take action. But then you have to observe every week. See for any abnormality and then act on it. Say you find that on friday your sleep pattern was worse then try to find the reasons and then avoid that.

So you have to either passively or actively work on the analytics. If you ain’t doing that then it is a just a fancy expense. Which is fine but you need to be clear about it and not live in delusion.

I hope you see your activity tracker differently. And try taking action based on analytics, it is like unlocking a whole different world of possibilities.