Category: Personal (Page 2 of 4)

Growing up, I was pretty active physically. But after leaving home for college and pursuing a career in computers, my activity level continued to fall while my weight moved in the opposite direction. I tried numerous times to start working out regularly, but I would always fall off the wagon after a matter of weeks when life got extra busy. While I’d resisted the idea for years, last fall I finally decided to start working twice a week with a personal trainer, and the results have been fantastic–I now work out regularly and reliably (both with my trainer and on my own in between), I feel stronger, healthier, and happier, and my career is none the worse for spending the extra time I didn’t think I had.

I’ve told several colleagues this story (not surprisingly, many in Silicon Valley are in the same boat–working long hours and neglecting their health even though they’re aware that it’s a problem), and it’s inspired several of them to follow suit. And apparently I’m not alone. So I thought it would be worth recounting here both why this has worked so well and why it nevertheless took me far too long to convince myself to do it.

What’s so great about a personal trainer?

The biggest advantage by far of working with a personal trainer is that I actually go work out regularly now. That’s because my trainer puts our appointments on my calendar every week, waits for me to show up, and charges me money if I don’t. That may sound glib, but the core problem I’ve had for the past few years is that I couldn’t bring myself to work out regularly on my own. I’d get too busy, or there wouldn’t be a convenient time, or I’d be tired, or whatever, but the bottom line is it wouldn’t get done, and now it does. I like to think of myself as someone with a strong will, a good sense of discipline, and a rational, long-term outlook, but clearly I’m not the only one that finds it hard to “kick my own butt” into exercising regularly. Instead of worrying about exactly what exercises to do and how often, the “high-order bit” in fixing my situation was “just show up a few times a week and do anything“.

In retrospect, the solution is so obvious: success looks like you blocking off an hour on your calendar a few times a week to go to the gym, and doing that consistently for the foreseeable future. Rather than trying to convince myself to do this ad hoc on my own, working with a trainer ensures this outcome by design. It’s a classic form of the well-known “brain hack” where you force yourself into doing something you know is right for you by creating the conditions in advance, when you’re rationally detached, rather than in the moment, when your baser instincts are in firmer control. And since I pay for my sessions in chunks of 10, and my trainer books our appointments every week, it really keeps me “on the treadmill” (both literally and figuratively).

Of course, there’s more to the value of working with a trainer than just the “forced accountability” to actually show up. My trainer knows what I’m capable of, where my weak spots are, and what my goals are (I just want to be in decent shape, not a body builder or top athlete), and she tailors our workout each time to keep me working on the right exercises with the right intensity and variety. She definitely pushes me harder than I would work on my own (“you can do one last set, can’t you? come on…”), but she also keeps me safe by watching my form and adjusting or eliminating exercises if anything is starting to hurt or look weird. This in turn lets me “turn my brain off” by not having to will myself to keep going or worry about what exercise to do next or whether I’m doing it right (all of which I’d have to do if I were working out solo), and as a result I get a more efficient and impactful workout for the time allotted.

What took you so long?

For several years, “not being in great shape”–or, more specifically, “not having regular exercise be a built-in part of my lifestyle”–has been at the top of my list of personal problems I’d like to improve. I’ve been quite fortunate in terms of family and career (my big problem being “I just want to work all the time”), but I just couldn’t seem to get “work out regularly” checked off my life’s to-do list. Reflecting on why it was so hard for me to tackle this problem–even though I cared about fixing it and had the means–I think it boiled down to the following combination of factors, which many people in my situation also face:

• It’s not a crisis (yet). I was never “dangerously over weight”, just a bit pudgier than I’d like, and with the situation slowly worsening over time. I gained on average about 5 lbs per year since getting married, though my weight often fluctuated that much in the space of a week, so it was the long-term trend that was a problem, but in the short term it was hard to convince myself “you’ve got to drop everything and deal with this now“.
• I should be able to fix this on my own. As I mentioned above, I tend to think “I’m a smart, capable person, so I don’t need help from other so-called professionals” when it comes to solving my problems. Especially for getting in shape, I know how to do it, and my needs are fairly modest and normal, so I often told myself that getting a personal trainer amounted to “being a wuss” and admitting a lack of will power or discipline or knowledge, which was “unbecoming for someone of my abilities”.
• It’s expensive. While I’m well-employed enough to reasonably afford to pay a personal trainer, it’s still a lot of money. My trainer is part of Google’s “g-fit” program, and I pay a subsidized rate of $50/hour (it’s often higher at private gyms). Meeting twice a week works out to roughly $5,000/year for this service. That’s a serious chunk of change, and although “it’s hard to put a price on your health and happiness”, it was enough to further fuel my apprehension about “taking the plunge”.
• I can’t afford the time. Probably the single biggest deterrent to getting in shape was my inability to convince myself that the few hours a week I would need to dedicate would actually be worth the opportunity cost of less time working or less time spent with my family. As a “startup guy”, both at Plaxo and more recently building Google+, I always feel like there’s more to do and it really matters and the impact is real. In other words, I have the “first-world problem” that I love my job, I’m good at it, and I have the chance to really change the world and get well compensated in the process. So it’s always hard to pull myself away from that, even to spend time with my family, whom I adore and already don’t see enough. Thus taking even more time away to work something as “vain and optional” as improving my physique was just a hard thing to convince myself was a worthy use of my limited time.

Now rationally, of course, I realize that none of these arguments actually make much sense. Of course staying healthy is important and worthwhile, of course it’s a reasonable (and ultimately modest) investment of time and money, and of course “Parkinson’s law” will ensure that my career will not go up in flames because I spend a few hours a week working out. I know of plenty of people who are a lot busier and more important than me that work out regularly and swear by it, so clearly this is a solvable problem with plenty of “existence proofs”. But it held me up for years nonetheless, so I bring it up in the hopes that if some of these excuses ring a bell for you, this might help you fight back.

Is it really worth the investment of money and time?

Obviously not everyone can afford a personal trainer, but I would argue that for most busy professionals, it’s both achievable and money well spent. Most people I know in Silicon Valley work really hard and wish they were in better shape, but are actually bounded more by time than by money to do something about it. So once you convince yourself that you can afford the time, the money should actually be “the easy part”. If someone offered to wave a magic wand and make you healthy and active for the cost of $5,000, I bet a lot of people would take it. Yet that’s exactly what you can do by getting a trainer (and even cheaper if you do small group sessions or only meet once a week). It’s particularly convenient at Google because they have on-site trainers and on-site gyms with lockers/showers (so it really is as simple as “going to my 3pm meeting on the first floor”), but many people live or work near gyms and have flexible enough schedules that they can pencil in time with a trainer a couple times a week. And of course, as many people told me before (and I’m telling you now), it does come with a “high ROI” in terms of having more energy, sleeping better, and spending less time worrying that you’re not getting in shape.

In short, I couldn’t be happier with the choice to start working with a personal trainer, and if you’re anything like me, I bet you’d feel the same if you gave it a try. Let me know if you do (or have already done so recently); I’d love to hear from more people who are figuring out how to be healthy and geeky at the same time!

Yesterday one of my wife’s friends came over to visit, and we decided on a lark to watch the Oscars (which we haven’t done most years). Even though we pay for Cable and are avid TiVo users, due to a variety of circumstances we missed both the beginning of the Oscars and–more importantly–the entire finale, from best female actress through best picture. My frustration and indignation led to me to think systematically about the various ways that technology could and should have helped us avoid this problem. I decided to share my thoughts in the hope that better understanding technology’s current limitations will help inspire and illuminate the way to improving them. As usual, I welcome your feedback, comments, and additional thoughts on this topic.

The essence of the failure was this: the Oscars was content that we wanted to watch, we were entitled to watch, but were ultimately unable to watch. But specifically, here’s what went wrong that could and should have done better:

• Nothing alerted me that the Oscars was even on that day, nor did it prompt me to record it. I happened to return home early that day from the Plaxo ski trip, but might well have otherwise missed it completely. This is ridiculous given that the Oscars is a big cultural event in America, and that lots of people were planning to watch and record it. That “wisdom of the crowds” should have caused TiVo or someone to send me an email or otherwise prompt me to ask “Lots of people are planning to watch the Oscars–should I TiVo that for you?”
• As a result of not having scheduled the Oscars to record in advance, when we turned on the TV it turned out that the red carpet pre-show had started 15 minutes ago. Sadly, there was no way to go back and watch the 15 minutes we had missed. Normally TiVo buffers the last 30 minutes of live TV, but when you change channels, it wipes out the buffer, and in this case we were not already on the channel where the Oscars were being recorded. Yet clearly this content could and should be easily accessible, especially when it just happened–you could imagine a set of servers in the cloud buffering the last 30 minutes of each channel, and then providing a similar TiVo-like near-past rewind feature no matter which channel you happen to change to (this would be a lot easier than full on-demand since the last 30 minutes of all channels is a tiny subset of the total content on TV).
• Once we started watching TV and looked at the schedule, we told TiVo to record the Oscars, but elected to skip the subsequent Barbara Walters interview or whatever was scheduled to follow. Part way through watching in near-real-time, my wife and her friend decided to take a break and do something else (a luxury normally afforded by TiVo). When they came back to finish watching, we discovered to our horror that the Oscars had run 30+ minutes longer than scheduled, and thus we had missed the entire finale. We hadn’t scheduled anything to record after the Oscars, so TiVo in theory could have easily recorded this extra material, but we hadn’t told it to do so, and it didn’t know the program had run long, and its subsequent 30-minute buffer had passed over the finale hours ago, so we were sunk. There are multiple failures at work here:

1. TiVo didn’t know that the Oscars would run long or that it was running long. My intent as a user was “record the Oscars in its entirety” but what actually happens is TiVo looks at the (static and always-out-of-date) program guide data and says “ok, I’ll record channel 123 from 5:30pm until 8:30pm and hope that does the trick”. Ideally TiVo should get updated program guide data on-the-fly when a program runs long, or else it should be able to detect that the current program has not yet ended and adjust its recording time appropriately. In absence of those capabilities, TiVo has a somewhat hackish solution of knowing which programs are “live broadcasts” and asking you “do you want to append extra recording time just in case?” when you go to record the show. We would have been saved if we’d chosen to do so, but that brings me to…
2. We had no information that the Oscars was likely to run long. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Once we discovered our error, my wife’s friend remarked, “oh yeah, the Oscars always runs long”. Well, in that case, there should be ample historical data of the expected chance that a repeated live event like the Oscars should have extra time appended to the recording, and TiVo should be able to present that data to help its users make a more informed choice about whether to add additional recording time. If failure #1 was addressed, this whole issue would me moot, but in the interim, if TiVo is going to pass the buck to its users to decide when to add recording time, it should at least gather enough information to help the user make an informed choice.
3. We weren’t able to go back and watch the TV we had missed, even though nothing else was being recorded during that time. Even though we hadn’t specifically told TiVo to record past the scheduled end of the Oscars, we also hadn’t told it to record anything else. So it was just sitting there, on the channel we wanted to record, doing nothing. Well, actually it was buffering more content, but only for 30 minutes, and only until it changed channels a few hours later to record some other pre-scheduled show. With hard drives as cheap as they are today, there’s no reason TiVo couldn’t have kept recording that same channel until it was asked to change channels. You could easily imagine an automatic overrun-prevention scheme where TiVo keeps recording say an extra hour after each scheduled show (unless it’s asked to change channels in the interim) and holds that in a separate, low-priority storage area (like the suggestions it records when extra space is free) that’s available to be retrieved at the end of a show (“The scheduled portion of this show has now ended, but would you like to keep watching?”), provided you watch that show soon after it was first recorded. In this case, it was only a few hours after the scheduled show had ended, so TiVo certainly would have had the room and ability to do this for us.

• Dismayed at our failure to properly record the Oscars finale, we hoped that online content delivery had matured to the point where we could just watch the part we had missed online. After all, this is a major event on a broadcast channel whose main point is to draw attention to the movie industry, so if there were ever TV content whose owners should be unconflicted about maximizing viewership in any form, this should be it. But again, here we failed. First of all, there was no way to go online without seeing all the results, thus ruining the suspense we were hoping to experience. One could easily imagine first asking users if they had seen the Oscars, and having a separate experience for those wanting to watch it for the first time vs. those merely wanting a summary or re-cap. But even despite that setback, there was no way to watch the finale online in its entirety. The official Oscars website did have full video of the acceptance speeches, which was certainly better than nothing, but we still missed the introductions, the buildup, and so on. It blows my mind that you still can’t go online and just watch the raw feed, even of a major event on a broadcast channel like ABC, even when the event happened just a few hours ago. In this case it seems hard to believe that the hold-up would be a question of whether the viewer is entitled to view this content (compared to, say, some HBO special or a feature-length movie), but even if it were, my cable company knows that I pay to receive ABC, and presumably has this information available digitally somewhere. Clips are nice, but ABC must have thought the Oscars show was worth watching in its entirety (since it broadcast the whole thing), so there should be some way to watch it that way online, especially soon after it aired (again, this is a simpler problem than archiving all historical TV footage for on-demand viewing). Of course, there is one answer here: I’m sure I could have found the full Oscars recording on bittorrent and downloaded it. How sad (if not unexpected) that the “pirates” are the closest ones to delivering the user experience that the content owners themselves should be striving for!

Finally, aside from just enabling me to passively consume this content I wanted, I couldn’t help but notice a lot of missed opportunity to make watching the Oscars a more compelling, consuming, and social experience. For instance, I had very little context about the films and nominees–which were expected to win? Who had won or been nominated before? Which were my friends’ favorites? In some cases, I didn’t even know which actors had been in which films, or how well those films had done (both in the box office and with critics). An online companion to the Oscars could have provided all of this information, and thus drawn me in much more deeply. And with a social dimension (virtually watching along with my friends and seeing their predictions and reactions), it could have been very compelling indeed. If such information was available Online, the broadcast certainly didn’t try to drive any attention there (not even a quick banner under the show saying “Find out more about all the nominees at Oscar.com”, at least not that I saw). And my guess is that whatever was online wasn’t nearly interactive enough or real-time enough for the kind of “follow along with the show and learn more as it unfolds” type of experience I’m imagining. And even if such an experience were built, my guess is it would only be real-time with the live broadcast. But there’s no reason it couldn’t prompt you to click when you’ve seen each award being presented (even if watching later on your TiVo) and only then revealing the details of how your pick compared to your friends and so on.

So in conclusion, I think there’s so much opportunity here to make TV content easier and more reliable to consume, and there’s even more opportunity to make it more interactive and social. I know I’m not the first person to realize this, but it still amazes me when you really think in detail about the current state of the art how many failures and opportunities there are right in front of us. As anyone who knows me is painfully aware, I’m a huge TiVo fan, but in this case TiVo let me down. It wasn’t entirely TiVo’s fault, of course, but the net result is the same. And in terms of making the TV experience more interactive and social, it seems like the first step is to get a bunch of smart Silicon Valley types embedded in the large cable companies, especially the ones that aren’t scared of the internet. Well, personally I’m feeling pretty good about that one. 😉

My good friend Chris’s wife Annamarie MacLeod is an actor, and she’s starring in a new play called No Such Thing that opens tonight in San Francisco. Michelle and I went to see the final dress rehearsal last night, and we were both very impressed.

The play is essentially a haunting, impressionistic sketch of a man gradually succumbing to the stresses of work, life, and romantic rivalry. It’s a minimalist production–nearly bare set, very little dialog–and so much of the story is told through the expressions on the actors’ faces and their movements. It also uses projected video and sound, as well as creative lighting, to intensify the mood and add to the narrative.

The way I saw the play described sounded very high-concept. But it never felt hoaky to me, or arty-for-the-sake-of-being-arty. Quite to the contrary: I found the basic story it told to be very effective and compelling, and the minimalism draws you in and gets you to relate more personally, because your mind is filling in the pieces from your own experiences. I liken it to one of those pencil sketches of a female form by Matisse–it’s impressive because it speaks to you, and it’s even more impressive because it does so with only a few strokes.

The play is a 70-minute one-act with a cast of 5 or 6 in a small and intimate theater (which is why the actors can convey so much with subtle expressions and movements), produced by naked masks. It’s playing on Friday and Saturday for the next three weekends (except the Friday after Thanksgiving). I think you’ll find it’s time well spent.