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Gamifying my daily stroll

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The walkin' man walks.

The walkin’ man walks.

I'm pretty happy with this FitBit so far. In the couple of weeks I’ve had it, I’ve only missed my 10,000-step goal once: that was the day we drove the 500 miles back from the North Carolina beach. Most days, I’m well over 10,000. The subtle nature of the FitBit — that it quietly remembers every freaking step — has a tendency to gamify the act of walking. You want to better your high score, even if the reward is no more than a silly badge appearing on your phone. And you definitely don’t want to see the sad-face that appears when you’ve fallen short. Too bad it doesn’t also administer a mild electric shock.

Not that I’m experiencing dramatic weight loss. It is just walking after all, not the Tour de France. I’ll never attain the physique of Lance Armstrong this way, but I suppose I’ll never have his pharmaceutical bills either.

Anyway, just an update. I like it so much I ordered one for the wife.

The good: It’s tiny and completely unobtrusive, easy to forget you have it clipped on. It creates a surprisingly effective incentive to get off one’s behind every single day. Checking it against a GPS, it seems pretty accurate at recording steps. There’s no recharging or docking or anything else to remember. It resets at zero every night at midnight so there’s no fudging the exercise between one day and the next. The battery is supposed to last three months.

The not-so-good: I think it has a tendency to overcount steps around the house, sometimes showing I’ve walked a half-mile in a morning of puttering around indoors. That can’t be right. But I’ll take it anyway.

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Comments

  1. Deb says

    you’re doing great with that–I did slap mine on last week and was quite chagrined to see how far from 10,000 I was—sad face, indeed…and that was mine. On the upside, I am enjoying my book–especially since part is in Cinque Terre, which I’ve been lucky enough to visit.

    • Dave Knadler says

      I want to see Cinque Terre myself, after reading the book. Although the author does mention that it’s gotten kind of crowded since 1962.

  2. John H. says

    I think we’ve all had that experience of enjoying a device/game/whatever that appears to cheat slightly in our favor, but not so much that it *really* feels like cheating. The meaningless reward that we still strive for is another interesting aspect of the human mind. Yes, the badge represents an actual achievement, yet somehow the achievement wouldn’t feel the same without the badge. Stuff like this is why I was a psych major… and also why I now work with computers.

  3. Judy Martin says

    Great, Dave! You can add even more steps if you join our Walk4Hearing on November 9 at Metropolitan Park. (I still walk the old-fashioned way, with a pedometer in my pocket or attached in some way. And hooray for added though undeserved steps.)