Get What’s Coming

Though it’s apparently been around for years, I just recently learned about the USPS’s Informed Delivery service, which sends a daily email digest of your soon-to-arrive postal mail – scans of the front of letters that will be showing up later that day in your mailbox, and tracking updates and delivery timing for packages coming in the next few days. It’s a free service, and though I was dubious as to whether it would work, in fact, it totally does.

If you live in a house, Informed Delivery might be genuinely useful; from the dashboard, you can schedule deliveries for specific times, leave delivery instructions (“put it on the back porch”), and the like. But here in my NYC apartment, with a doorman able to accept and safeguard packages at any point, it don’t much help me out. Indeed, in my own life, I can’t really make a functional case for the service at all. And, at the same time, it makes me genuinely happy. There’s just something delightful about opening my mailbox, already knowing what’s going to be inside.

I know that’s a bit dumb. But, in these crazy times, perhaps I’m just happy for anything that makes me feel some small amount of power and control in the world. It may be a small win, but in this environment, I’ll take any win I can get.

June 26, 2020

Connected

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”
– Henry Thoreau, Walden

In the academic psychology world, there are two particularly famous, large-scale studies of health and happiness – the Terman Study and the Grant Study, each of which followed cohorts throughout almost the entirety of their lives. And both, in the end, reached similar conclusions: your relationships, and the people in your life, are indeed what matter most. But not just from a happiness perspective; even in terms of longevity, the Terman study observed “connecting with and helping others is more important than obsessing over a rigorous exercise program,” and the Grant study discovered the single best predictor of whether someone would still be alive and thriving at 80 was whether there was currently “someone they would feel comfortable phoning at four in the morning to tell their troubles to.”

Yet modern life – and particularly modern, urban life – seems to transpire against maintaining connections. In the two decades since graduating college, my friends have spread across the country, started families, dived deep into demanding jobs. All of which has made it far more difficult to stay close, especially when my own life and schedule are just as densely packed.

Still, whether in friendships, or for work (where the old ‘it’s who you know’ adage applies as much as ever), trying to maintain those relationships nonetheless has long been important to me. So, as with many other areas of my life, I’ve depended on technology for an assist. For years, I used the CRM system Contactually; since it pivoted towards the real estate world (eventually being acquired by mega-brokerage Compass), I switched to the similar Cloze instead.

The idea of Cloze is simple: you bucket your contacts into groups (whether friends and family or loose connections, customers or vendors, etc.), and then set a frequency with which you’d like to stay in touch with members of that group. Cloze watches your emails and calendar and text messages and calls, and automatically maintains a timeline of your interactions with each contact. And, if the time since the last exchange drifts beyond the interval that you’ve set, Cloze automatically reminds you to reach out.

In normal times, I spend a few minutes each day pinging the people Cloze flags, and I’ve done my best to keep that up despite the lockdown, with emails or texts or calls to a cousin in LA, a former colleague in Tel Aviv, an old friend down in Miami Beach, and dozens of others. Mostly, I’ve just sent best wishes and healthy vibes, my hopes that they’re staying safe and sane through this all. And, in return, I’ve gotten updates on how each is navigating these crazy times, along with kind words and well-wishes in return.

Especially here in NYC, where we’re deep into full terrarium, it’s been excellent to remember how far the world – and my ties to it – extends beyond these walls; to be reminded how lucky I am to have those friends and family, even at a distance. They make the latitudes and longitudes, indeed.

April 27, 2020

Homework(out)

While just two days back I was unsure of whether to cancel live training sessions, by now it seems like the obvious choice.  So, with far less preparation than ideal, I’ve lept into converting Composite’s beta into something geared for digitally-served, at-home training (which was always part of the roadmap, though substantially further out), rather than human-trainer-delivered, in-gym training (as it’s been thus far).

If all goes well, I’m hoping I should be able to roll out something by early next week.  At which point, I’ll be posting more info here.  So, even if you’re not in NYC, if you’re stuck inside, and looking for ways to stay fit (and sane), circle back then as you’ll hopefully soon be able to sign up for the beta.

Back to coding, and to hiding out from the world as much as possible.

March 13, 2020

Untethered

As I’ve written previously, these days, I work from my phone and iPad more than ever. But, at heart, I’m still ‘mobile second.’ For long or demanding tasks, I’m orders of magnitude faster and more comfortable using a PC.

So, last week, I was dismayed to find the space bar of my trusty MacBook Air acting up, ignoring every few clicks, occasionally double-spacing after a single press. By this weekend, things had worsened, and nearly none of my space-barring yielded single spaces, alternating entirely between nothing and doubles.

Monday, I headed to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue for a Genius Bar appointment. Where, despite this being a known issue with Apple’s newer butterfly key switches, they didn’t have any replacement keyboards in stock.

Hopefully, the part will be in today or tomorrow, and I’ll have a repaired computer back by the end of the week. But, in the meantime, I’m doing my best to slog along with just my mobile devices, using two side-by-side for ghetto-fabulous multi-tasking, coding in patently unsuitable editor environments.

And all I can say is: Joni was right. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone, indeed.

February 26, 2020

Story Time

As I recently wrote, I’m not a big poster on social media. Outside of Twitter, I don’t even look at most social networks with any regularity. But Jess is a big Instagram reader (watcher / looker?), and my colleagues, who are mostly about half my age, seem to mediate their entire lives through the app. So, out of a vague sense of FOMO, or possibly a fear that I’ve become even more of an old, cantankerous Luddite than I’d realized, I recently decided to give Insta-life a whirl.

This weekend, I posted to my ‘story’ for the first time: a captioned photo of the Valentine’s Day tableau Jess left for me on our bed – a pile of cards, surrounded by a giant heart made from a dozen bags of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups (a guilty pleasure I usually finish off before I’ve carried the rest of our groceries home).  

In the days since, whether cooking pasta at home, visiting the MoMA with Jess and my parents, eating dinner with them all at The Loyal, or working at the gym this morning, I’ve snapped a dozen or so further photos, with the intention – if not yet the follow-through – of similarly story-posting.  Even if, at this point, I’m still not entirely clear about what kind of stuff goes in stories versus regular posts.  

Similarly, though I’ve added a bunch of new accounts to my stream, I’m also unsure what kind of picture and video content I actually care enough about to make me reflexively pop open the app.  Especially as compared to Twitter, where I already satisfy my voyeuristic political / journalistic hobbyism while also nerding out on fitness science and relishing really terrible dad jokes.

Plus, I still feel incredibly self-conscious (and, really, self-appearance-judgy) about the idea of selfies and first-person videos and recorded workouts.  At a deeper level, I’m not even sure what kind of stuff I think I should be posting in the first place.  Is it random bullshit à la this site? Personal branding content in the fitness or fitness-tech space? A revival of my long-dormant street and landscape photographing interest?

So, in short, lots still to learn and puzzle through.  But, in the meantime, I’m going to do my best to muddle ahead.  Feel free to follow along. Even if, I suspect, it won’t be pretty.

February 17, 2020

App-etizing

I remember, years ago, reading (possibly in the excellent Design of Everyday Things?) about an architect who designed a college campus without any paved paths between the buildings. Instead, he simply planted grass everywhere, then came back a year later, and paved over the grassless paths worn down where people had actually walked.

I was thinking of that story this morning, as I looked at my phone. As I wrote about recently, I tend to work best when I can sit down and focus. But, sadly, my schedule is too fractured, and (even with my best attempts at streamlining and focusing) my to-do list too long to make everything fit. So, this year, I’ve been trying to do more on my phone, wedging tasks into the interstitial chunks of my day. I journaled on the subway ride to work this morning, for example, and I’m banging out this post on the small screen while on a quick afternoon coffee break.

As a result, I’m suddenly using a bunch of apps that I hadn’t regularly before. Which meant it was probably time to rearrange my home screen.

But rather than my normal approach – trying to plan the theoretically perfect layout – I’m instead taking a page from that college architect: each time I use an app, I drag it to the top left of my home screen. I’m planning to keep it up for the balance of the week. After which, I should have my apps organized by actual priority, sorted into the paths of my real-world daily use.

Photo coming once that’s done. I’m curious to see how it ends up.

January 7, 2020

Streaking

For years and years, I managed my to-do list in a collection of text files. And, as a dyed-in-the-wool nerd, that worked excellently for me. I leaned on my text editor and a series of scripts to slice and dice with ease.

But as my daily schedule changed, my device usage did, too; I found myself away from my laptop, working solely from my iPad and phone, for even whole days at a time. I auditioned a slew of text editor apps, but could never find a way to make things work even a fraction as well as I had before.

So, about five years back, I switched over to Todoist. Its handling of recurring tasks, and its powerful Boolean filters, got me quickly back to where I’d been in my text-file days.

Still, my to-do list tends to be looooong. So, when I decided to make 2020 a year of focus, I knew I needed to bring in reinforcements. Based on a slew of positive reviews, I downloaded Streaks, and set it up with a handful of my most important habits (including counting Pomodoros spent on my big project for the day).

Obviously, four days into the year, it’s a bit early to tell. But, thus far, it seems like it just might be the boost I need to make my 2020 consistent, and consistently good.

January 4, 2020

By the Book

One of the craziest things about fast-changing technology is how quickly we take it for granted. For example, with Apple Maps on my phone, I’ve almost forgotten how much of traveling someplace new previously consisted of getting lost along the way. A couple months back, I went apple picking with Jess, an hour or so upstate. And, en route, I missed a turn-off from one country road to another. Armed with GPS, we rerouted, and still made it to the orchard just five minutes past the initially estimated time. But, without it, we easily could have just never found the place. In fact, even after mobile maps first became a thing, smartphones weren’t GPS enabled for a few more years, and it was still possible to get completely lost if you botched a turn. I vividly remember sitting pulled over on the side of a New Jersey highway one afternoon, scrolling endlessly around a zoomed-in map, trying to figure out where I was, so I could drop a pin and navigate the rest of the way to my destination.

Similarly, when I first moved to NYC, finding a restaurant while out and about in the city was inevitably a crap shoot. Dropped into a random neighborhood, and without Foursquare or The Infatuation (my now go-to restaurant reconnaissance pair), I had no way of figuring out what good options existed nearby.  I’d simply look for places that looked crowded, or whose signage seemed somehow appealing, and hope for the best.

But, at least, when I was back in my apartment, and planning meals in advance, I had one trusty resource: the Zagat restaurant guide.  As a budding foodie, I spent endless time pouring over its pages, and (as this was pre Resy and OpenTable) dialing for reservations.  At one point, I even hit on the idea of cycling through the guide alphabetically, eating at a restaurant whose name began with ‘A’ one week, then with ‘B’ the next.

Still, I had pretty much forgotten about Zagat entirely, until I saw, about a year and a half ago, that the aforementioned The Infatuation had just acquired the Zagat brand.  So when I got an email last spring with an invitation to submit reviews for the new 2020 New York City guide, I couldn’t resist.

By way of thanks for my additions, Zagat just sent along a copy of the finished guide:

And I couldn’t be more thrilled.

I won’t be toting it along with me day-to-day, nor honestly even consulting it regularly as my go-to for restaurant planning,

But I’m nonetheless enjoying picking it up from time to time to thumb my way through. It’s still an excellent resource. And it’s a great reminder of how lucky we are to have a web full of resources, any time we want, right there in the palms of our hands.

January 2, 2020

Hit the Hay

As ever, the Composite research, coding, and field-testing continues. And, in an interesting confluence of events, I stumbled across a research paper today that perfectly lines up with something I’ve recently experienced anecdotally in my own life.

For a while, I’ve been playing with biometric data sources that track fatigue and training status, so the Composite algorithm can square a theoretically ideal workout plan (heavy back squats today at 85% of my max) with the ever-changing reality of day-to-day life (I’m feeling run-down this morning, slept terribly, and think I might be coming down with a cold – better reduce the weight of those squats). And, actually, I’ve been making a bunch of progress on that front, measuring things like daily increase / decrease in grip strength (using a device called a dynamometer, which research shows correlates well with central nervous system fatigue), and tracking heart rate variability (using the excellent HRV4Training app to collect similarly research-backed data).

But, thus far, though I’d wanted to track sleep, too, most of the iPhone apps I’d found to do so were pretty much garbage. Though they all kicked out impressive-looking visualizations, they were often demonstrably incorrect – apps would show me deep in REM sleep when I knew I’d actually been awake and headed to the bathroom to pee.

So, on a friends recommendation, I bit the bullet, downloaded the Apple Watch app AutoSleep, and figured out an early-evening charging schedule that let me wear my watch to bed rather than just charging it overnight. And, in short, AutoSleep is pretty amazing – both in the detail it provides, and the accuracy with which it does so. Even if I end up just passing out for a nap on the couch without meaning to midday, the app somehow accurately senses when I do, and kicks out a ton of related data about the siesta.

From my first month of AutoSleep, however, I made an unhappy discovery: I sleep much less each night than I’d previously thought. Before, I would have said that I get 7 to 7 1/2 hours nightly. But, it turns out, that’s how long I spend in bed, trying to sleep; I’m actually out cold for only 85-90% of that time – more like 6 or 6 1/2 hours – once I factor in falling asleep, and waking for random small pockets throughout the night.

Even so, it turns out I may still be doing better than most. As I mentioned, I found a study this morning which estimates most people only really sleep about 80% of the time they’re trying to do so. Getting 7 1/2 hours of shuteye therefore probably requires shooting for a whopping 9.

If you want an accurate sense of how much sleep you really get yourself, and you happen to own an Apple Watch, I’d suggest you, too, download AutoSleep and check things out. And, if you don’t, but are serious about sleep for performance and health, you should probably assume you’re not too far from the rest of us, and add some substantial padding to your sleep time, Netflix be damned.

May 29, 2019

Future Shock

Human brains are terrible at understanding exponential growth, so perhaps it’s not surprising that we take the crazy advances of computer processor speed and miniaturization for granted. For example, those little birthday cards that play music have more computing power than the entire Allied Forces had back in 1945.

That said, I’m still kind of blown away by my Apple Watch. I mean, the thing is less than two inches square, and less than a half-inch thick, yet I can take it with me on a run, leave my phone behind, and still track the route and check my pace, listen to music (on even teeny-tinier Bluetooth earbuds), and field calls and texts mid-run.

Though, conversely, the only other piece of tech that similarly blows my mind is the fax machine – I still kind of get overwhelmed thinking about a device where you can feed in a piece of paper, and the same thing prints out of another matching device, moments later, potentially thousands and thousands of miles away. So I may not be the best person to judge.

April 15, 2019