Like so many, I picked up a Fitbit last month. I thought it would be a fun way to gain some insight into my activity and help me stay a little more active. Generally, I really like the little fella, though my activity has been hampered by a round of flu in the household, a few very cold weeks of wintertime weather, and a lot of busy, long days. (I wonder what activity best represents using a standing desk; Fitbit seems to think I’m mostly lethargic during the work day, but I think I should get some points for standing there.)

Fitbit offers a premium tier that provides extra reports and the ability to download one’s data for $50 per year. I’m not particularly interested in most of the features that come with premium membership, but I am a data guy, so the Fitbit API offers, albeit with some work, a way to get my data out of their system.

Working directly with the data yields plenty of benefits. Currently the charts on the fitbit web site all require Flash, so as a Click to Flash user I have a lot of clicking to do, all to view a relatively simple bar plot that doesn’t tell me that much. Sleep is a great example. The built-in chart of sleep at Fitbit doesn’t offer much information, and all its variants are simply more bar plots. There’s a nightly activity chart that shows times awake or stirring, but not a view that compares that activity against other nights or shows relative sleep-wake times.

Well, we can fix that.

I’m using the Fitbit plugin from Slogger, modified to run by itself on a server and grab my daily data. It saves the data I’m looking for, via the Fitbit API, to a text file that I can grab and process with R and ggplot2 to make some more useful and attractive plots for myself. Here’s what I’ve come up with for sleep.

There’s a lot more data here, in what I think is a much more interesting and attractive visualization: Relative times to sleep and wake, plus display of two variants of nighttime activity, fully awake and partially awake or stirring. (The Fitbit nightly graph shows them as a single category of wakefulness). Unlike the built-in graphic, this one shows comparative times across days, which is particularly useful for figuring out just why I’m dragging my feet so much this morning – of course, it’s because I’ve been up by 5:30 at the latest all week while pushing my bedtime further and further from its sweet spot.

Additional refinements might include adding the total sleep time to each bar, for more easy to read comparison. (This is basically all you get from the over-time graph that Fitbit provides by default.)

Data is fun and the programming, for both the data extraction via API and the manipulation and plotting in R, is enjoyable learning and pastime for me. I’ll continue to play with the Fitbit activity data for steps and overall activity and see what else I can come up with.

Rain here at high altitude since Friday, which is very unusual for wintertime. The landscape has melted and we can see our sodden backyard once again.

Cooped up, I turned to extra cups of coffee and playing with Alfred 2 workflows.

A few years ago I worked up a system using Alfred 1 to add items to a task list that gets displayed on my desktop with Geektool. The list itself is a Taskpaper compatible text file, and I use a TextMate bundle that I put together (derived from the Tasks bundle along with it.

With Alfred 2 it was fun to recreate and add to the functionality of my old script using workflows. I invoke the workflow with “do something” to add something to the top of my task list; later, “done something” will mark that item as completed and add a timestamp: Alfred uses the query you specify to find matching entries in the todo file, and acts on the one you select from that list of matches.

Here’s a quick tour. Adding an item via Alfred 2 and viewing the new entry in TextMate:

Then using Alfred 2 to find the same item and mark it as completed. You get a confirmation via growl and can see the updated item in TextMate:

I have some ideas to clean up and improve this workflow but do plan to release it. If you’re interested in seeing it now in all its ugly works-for-me state, just let me know.

So far it’s been lots of fun to work with the Alfred 2. If you’re an Alfred user considering the upgrade, I recommend checking it out!

Andrew DeGraff does, among other things, cool and finely-detailed diagrams of movement through locations in movies, such as Shaun of the Dead.

(source, via Andrew DeGraff’s blog with lots of cool images)

These are great:

Growstuff is a website where food gardeners will be able to track and share their food-growing efforts. A year ago I would have thought Skud’s proposal a little idealistic, with its emphasis on process, collaboration, radical openness, and inclusiveness. But my brush with fandom a year ago (when a distributed group of volunteers responded to my call for feature requests by drafting a beautifully organized 50+ page Google doc in about 48 hours) has made a true believer out of me. Moreover, I think food gardening is a natural fit for the kind of community-first approach Skud wants to pursue. I jumped at the chance to pick a project coming out of this friendly, highly collaborative world, and I can’t wait to see what it grows into.

(source)

One of the simple but non-obvious (to me) things about a system like GTD is the exhortation that complex intellectual work can be organized into physical actions.

Now there are all kinds of reasons why lots of the work I and others do is hard to organize that way, but being conscious of physical actions as a unit of analysis has helped me do one thing much better and much more frequently: listening to music.

Here’s the thing: in an office I can’t turn on a tune until I get my headphones out. I have spent entire days occasionally thinking to myself “I’d like to listen to something,” but my headphones are over in my briefcase.

Seriously, that’s like two or three feet away sometimes. But it’s enough to prevent me from catching up with a podcast or playing an album that would be just right for an afternoon of cranking out work, that little bit of distance and distraction.

This may be a profound mental defect, that I cannot maintain a chain of thought long enough to pivot left, get a headset out of a bag, plug it in, launch rdio or instacast, find the playlist, press play, and return to work. Yet there is it, and when broken down like that I can see how that chain of action is actually relatively sophisticated. It involves several decisions: Podcast or music? Which show? Or which genre? Which artist, album, or playlist?

So let’s shorten that chain just a bit: Now when I get to the office, the first thing I do is get out the headphones and plug them in. I’m listening to a ton more than I did before – and importantly, I’m enjoying it.

In the same spirit, I’m doing something to help me do more reading, by keeping better lists of books I want to read, and then keeping one or more of those books nearby – on Kindle app or the countertop – which I have found makes it far more likely that I will pick it up and read it when I have a few free minutes.

I am aware that this is all basically a dramatically unjust oversimplification of behavioral economics’ finding that pre-slicing apples increases the likelihood of actually eating them at lunch. But this brings me back to where I started, which was a lot of recent reconsidering of key elements of GTD. This notion of small pre-requisites for accomplishing something complex or ambitious makes sense to me the past few weeks in a way that it did not previously – this resonance has proven to be valuable and I expect to continue to find new ways to take advantage of it.

I collected these notes through the course of the last couple of weeks. Today we get fully back to our work and school schedules, with school back in session after a long Christmas holiday. Some of these routines, established on the lazy days of vacation, will persist, though perhaps only on the weekends where time stretches out a little more languid.

Coffee

• Five-dark-thirty or so, grumpy dog at the bedroom door. Pull on a sweatshirt and go upstairs.
• switch on the machine
• prime boiler
• flip to steam
• fix portafilter in grouphead to warm
• feed dogs
• work day? Quick shower.
• not a work day? Sit with book or the news on the iPad.
• portafilter is warm; purge steam, pour milk, measure beans
• steam
• prime boiler, settle milk, grind, wipe spout, purge grouphead
• dose grounds, tap to settle, level, clean, fix in portafilter
• extract shot, wipe up grounds, log
• swirl shot, taste, pour milk
• clear brewhead, wipe machine
• sit and pause a sec

Toddler

Cold this morning. Coffee and breakfast while wife and little boy sleep a little longer. I’m off to work again while she takes care of him today. He goes back to school after the weekend.

I’ve grown to love our morning routine, where I get up and have a coffee and a few extra minutes, before they wake up, when she calls me: Our boy is cuddled up and asking for bunny grahams. So I pour a few into a bowl – she tells me he perks up his head, asks “hear that?” – and bring them downstairs. He says thank you and asks me to go back upstairs for a little while while he snuggles some more with his mom.

Later he comes upstairs with her, sometimes having asked her to carry him, but usually lately under his own power, eagerly climbing. On the stairs he grins at me and wonders aloud, “Is this meeee?” He knows the game.

“Good morning!” I smile back. “Is that a hippopotamus coming up the stairs?”

“No it’s me!” He exclaims.

“Are you a … Zebra?”

Spreading his arms wide and smiling huge, “No, I’m me!”

We might do a few more rounds. Is he an elephant, or a helicopter or a school bus? No! Smiles.

“Oh, well if you’re not a dolphin then can I have a hug?” I ask him, and he marches over in that way a toddler does, all swinging limbs at a half-run, to wrap his arms over my shoulders and lean against me so completely that his feet are somewhere vaguely in the air. There will be oatmeal to make and a diaper to change and any number of busy tasks to complete before we can hustle to the car and make our way to work and school, but for a few minutes we get to just smile and talk and hug.

Naptime

He’s down for a nap, so we get an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less. When he was a baby we would measure his naps by album duration. Now they’re a little more reliable, but still less so at home than at school, where he easily lays out his blanket and curls up on the cot alongside his friends. Sometimes he’s still lounging on the cot when I come to pick him up.

We have some lunch, or maybe just a snack, chips and somebody’s homemade salsa that’s surprisingly good. We sit on the sofa with a book or magazine, iPad or laptop, sock feet touching on the old coffee table. This sofa is getting a little creaky. Over this winter break we watched a lot of old West Wing episodes on the AppleTV. She’s always liked naps of her own and might lean her head on my shoulder, the way she did every evening when she was pregnant, falling asleep at 7pm.

An hour or so of sitting close together, quiet and easy before he wakes up and needs us to get out some yogurt and crackers, put on snow pants, find hat and gloves to go out for an adventure or a car ride, to run errands or go to the market.

warning: the following is probably not very interesting.

I’ve had a nice time lately doing some reworking on the internals of my little not-a-blog system that runs things around here. First, I’ve done a tiny bit of learning about responsive web design, so mobile browsers should now get a nice narrow page. I’m still tinkering with a visual style that I like, so the look and feel may change more. It’s fun to experiment with this stuff again; it’s been a lot of years since I was really up to speed with anything related to web design.

Also, I’ve switched the whole engine from Pandoc over to a fully-ruby markdown parser called kramdown. Kramdown is faster than Pandoc and may allow for a future state in which I can build and deploy the whole site from a mobile device, without needing to run any code on my laptop first. Moving away from pandoc is the first requirement for that, since I can’t run it on my server at textdrive. (This is one of those situations where an always-available home server or something like a box at Mac Mini Colo would be an ideal alternative.) The next piece of that chain would be a good mechanism to migrate files from Dropbox, where the prettygoodhat markdown files live and are editable from any number of iOS apps, to the web server where the build tool and deployed HTML files live.

It’s fun to have a tool that’s in-process as well as this relatively-new outlet for some thinking and writing. I’m enjoying both aspects of publishing here, quite a lot.

As reflections on a year passing and a new one entering tend to do, yesterday’s thoughts about not resolutions focused mostly on things that in one way or another I want to do a little differently. It occurs to me that this rollover of the calendar is a good time to spend a few minutes on the things I have in my life that are already sustaining. In other words, it’s not Thanksgiving, but I’m grateful.

My wife and I love one another and she supports me every day. She is far smarter than I am, level-headed, thoughtful and vibrant. She and I are partners, truly, and I am better and happier for it.

We have a beaming little boy who lights up our lives. He has given us some scares but he is healthy. Every day he startles me with an observation about his world, with his deep brown eyes and his quiet & constant voice.

Our jobs are rewarding and safe. I work with smart people who challenge me and to whom the work I do is important. The organization I work for produces something valuable and I feel good about that. I will remind myself of this as I approach the crunch time of a significant project over the next couple of months or so.

I live in a town that I love and that offers all kinds of things to me, my wife and our son.

We worry about saving enough, but we are not hungry. And I worry about the world that our son will find waiting for him someday. But our home is warm when it is dark and cold winter outside.

All these things I will carry into 2013. I’ll forget them and I will be at times impatient, anxious and frustrated; yet all these things that help to anchor – but also lift – my life are more persistent than those troubles. So on into the morning of January One.

Making New Years resolutions is not something I like to do, as a rule. The notion that this one week is the designated time we self-improve always rubs me the wrong way. Also, I’ve seen the gym during the firt two weeks of the year, and it is not somewhere I ever want to visit.

And yet. And yet the turn of the calendar is a natural place for reflection, and I’m enjoying a number of writers’ thoughts about 2012 and the upcoming new year. There are indeed some things I’d like to do better – or ways I might be better – and while I have no desire to call these resolutions, perhaps as reflections and intentions they will, over time and accrued gradually, enable some of the things I would like to see in my own 2013.

• Especially over the last heavily political year, I spent a lot of time refreshing Reeder and NetNewsWire. I want to be selective about what I pay attention to, and I want to continue to refine my focus on those things. So I’ve declared Newsreader (nearly) Null: I’m unsubscribing from virtually everything, and I’m moving reeder away from my home screen. (What am I keeping in? The toddler-blog of a friend I want to keep in touch with, a local weather blog, and a couple of writers. I reserve the right to add, of course. I’m not a totalitarian about it.)
• Conscientious focus: This is about work and home. I’m a highly distractable guy and I’d like to be less so. I want to change my fast-twitch distracted energy into something that helps me produce something. That impulse to check twitter because I’ve hit a block? Let’s replace it with five minutes of mind sweep review or a few sentences in Day One. That should improve my presence of mind at work and make it more likely that I’ll have interesting stories to tell when I’m not at work.
• Self-consciously social: Introverts like me don’t naturally gather people around them, but something very important to me is making sure that my currently-only-child toddler has plenty of opportunity to be social – and not in the “social network” sense. I’m still working on this one.
• Listening: Rdio app improvements the past couple of months substantially increased my music listening. I’ve re-listened to and enjoyed things I had not heard in months or years, in addition to finding new things to enjoy. I like it. I think music makes me better. Maybe if I hear even more of it I might get better at the guitar. Listening is of course about a lot more than music; it’s not just hearing what people say but being engaged with it, responding to it, processing on it. Here’s the thing about listening, really: Listening means attention that is reciprocal, that rewards that partner who is speaking and takes seriously what is being proffered; it allows for opportunity for thinking in the moment as well as in follow-up. It is a shorthand for being present and honoring the obligation that is implicit in having a relationship, whether it is at work or at dinner with my wife. Listening is loaded.

Things intentionally out of scope for this post: exercise, finance, fine cheeses, technologies, “workflows”, platforms, and Scotch.

Happy New Year!

I spent much of the week working at home in order to not be That Guy who is coughing a lot in the office. As a result I missed some of the easy camaraderie that appears at work this time of year – another thing that helps signal the emotional wind-down of the calendar, which must help counteract the stress of knowing just how many conversations we’ve all had about doing something “right after the first of the year.”

It has been an up and down holiday season around here due to sudden plan changes, a hard-to-shake cold and cough, lots of work that needs doing, and the slow onset of what finally feels like winter. I’ve taken the season on in bits and pieces, which may explain why this essay by Patrick Rhone hit me in the right spot.

I shrug my shoulders and ask her, “What can we do?” I have a lot of patience for things like this. In fact, in many ways, I look forward to them. Stuck in a line with things I have to buy and no control over the time that it is taking. It is these times I’m forced to do nothing but appreciate the moment. To observe the details of a life that goes by too fast. Mostly because, if not for these forced breaks, we run through it without recognizing that it will be over sooner than we ever think.

Patrick is attuned to those moments that make for a story, the kernel of an experience that in his skilled hands become something more, a story that can be shared. Like all stories that are successful at finding broader resonance than with only the author, this one carried something that rang important: the exhortation to pause and pay attention was a valuable reminder for me. After all, our work and lives are series of events, ways we felt at certain times, most tangible in the details that we think of later. For me – and not uniquely, I’m sure – many of the memorable moments are the times between the work, when I have a few seconds or minutes to reflect.

Working at home, a little sore and achy, I only got out of the house a few times total all week, and my social interaction was pretty limited, so it was a small set of moments that took me out of my head – deadlines, team organization, planning, shopping list, Robitussin – and helped me enjoy this Christmas season.

One of them, believe it or not, was pumping gas this morning. A small front was moving in, blowing cold wind but not yet any snow flurries. I started the pump, pulled my hat a little closer to my eyebrows, and stuffed my hands under my armpits, watching the gas station traffic: A skier still in his boots after catching the half day at Snowbowl, stiff-stepping to the pump; a dude from Phoenix, not dressed for the weather (come on, guy, it’s 7,000 feet up here), hustling into the shop door, it lit by a string of gold holiday lights.

Maybe the cold reminds me of growing up in the wintertime, maybe it was just nice to be out of the house for a few errands, but that two minutes or so of watching the world go by, just waiting and watching patiently while the city’s slowest gas pump filled up my tank was just what I needed. I would be busy again in a few minutes, but right then, no place to go and nothing else to do, was just about right.