Tag: quantifiedself

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1 Second Everyday

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how much is a video worth? How about 1 second of video every day for the rest of your life?

Believe it or not, that is exactly what I signed myself up for, as of Jan 14th, 2013. And since I’ve always been a fan of showing, not telling, here is a reel of the first 7 months of my journey.

But first, grab some popcorn and make yourself comfortable.

Pretty cool right?

The app is called 1SE, which stands for 1 Second Everyday. On Jan 14th I met my friend Sid Efromovich, who told me about it. It wasn’t a hard sell for me, seeing as how I started the very same day.

When I describe to people what it’s like for me to watch my reels, I say “it’s like having my life flash before my eyes…only I’m not dying.”

Granted it’s not my entire life, but still. I get to re-live my life in a way that wouldn’t have been possible back in the day, which was a Wednesday by the way (thanks Dane Cook for that little fun fact).

And I know, I’ve done the whole journal thing (in the form of my CANI log), but this is completely different. In just 1 second I am instantly transported back to that moment of my life. Where I was, who I was with, what i was doing, and how I was feeling. It’s nothing short of extraordinary.

Incidentally, this reminds me of the same guidelines as any good improv show. The first thing to do in a scene is establish who you are, where you are, and what you are doing.

Did I mention that I am currently enrolled in Improv 101 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and that my graduation show will be on Monday, August 26th at 6:30 pm at the UCB east theater?

Oh? I didn’t? Well now you know 🙂

But I digress…

What I noticed in the first couple days of recording videos, is that I had too many good moments to choose from. It felt like a waste to only use 1 second. Luckily, there’s an option to create an entirely separate “timeline.” I call it my B-Roll. That way, all the major moments are captured in my A-Roll, but for everything else that is still worth remembering, I have a B-Roll. The only challenge is that every day I must take at least 2 videos.

So how did it go down…?

At first I tried to plan out in advance when to take the videos. There’s even a built-in reminder system within the 1SE App to help you with this. Sometimes I would not check my phone at the right time though, and then I would have to take less exciting videos of my ride home or something. After all, I can’t miss a day and break the chain.

What ended up working best was going about my day, and finding moments that were interesting, unique, or beautiful, and take videos of those. Even if I wasn’t sure they were the best moments, my thinking was “at least I’ll have something at the end of the day to fall back on.” Then, if I had better moments later in the day, I could always delete the previous ones. No harm, no fowl.

It didn’t take long for it to become a habit and always think “what are my 1 seconds going to be today?”

It got a little challenging when all I would do is stay in and work at my home office, or when I would just go and teach my classes and take the same route to get there. The trick was to find a slightly different angle or aspect of the experience that I hadn’t captured before. You’d be surprised how many different ways you can record the same walk down a street.

One last word of caution…

Don’t forget to back up your phone at least once a week. The last thing you want is to create priceless memories and then have them taken away by some computer failure. Not cool.

Got a 1SE reel you want to show off? Post it in the comments for the world to see. That’s right, the world is reading this post. I said it.

P.S. For a different angle on the same 7 months, here’s my B Roll:

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My Favorite Way to Weigh In

I don’t know about you, but the thought of getting on my scale every morning and then having to manually enter my weight, body fat %, and Body Mass Index (BMI), makes me want to urinate all over my couch and then throw it out my 5th floor window.

Granted, I’m a strange character, with unusually low tolerance for manual work. But it’s more than that….

What infuriates me about such work, is that nagging feeling of “computers should be doing this for me.” It’s a waste of my creativity dammit! And that makes me angrier than a hungry patron in a fast food line with a broken cash register. Not a pretty site.

And so, with the prospect of this kind of drain on my otherwise chipper life, the WiFi scale was purchased! I use this Withings body analyzer model, which was originally recommended by Noah Kagan. You may remember him from such companies as AppSumo and Mint.

The beauty of the Withings WiFi scale (mind you, I’m receiving zero incentive to promote them. Perhaps they should throw me a bone? Or better yet, a free blood pressure monitor), is that it’s completely hands off. Set it and forget it, make Ron Popeil proud style.

Setting up your account is super easy, and it even links up to your LoseIt account (which I’m sure you all have now because of my compelling post on How I Tracked and Maintained my Weight Using LoseIt).

As I mentioned in said post, my daily calorie budget on LoseIt changed based on my weight (which increased above the target by a few pounds). And at the end of the day, who doesn’t love a good ol’ self correcting system? Right? 🙂

So far I haven’t analyzed my weight on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. In fact, I haven’t looked at it closely at all. *Sad face*. I’m still just collecting data to be used later. Believe me, my future self will thank me.

The only habit I had to create (notice how the habit theme keeps coming back…Charles Duhigg really struck a deep chord with me), was pulling my scale out from under my couch after my morning bathroom routine.

Parting Words of Wisdom

I wanted to be consistent with how much clothing I was wearing at the time of weigh-in. And as much as I love walking around naked, sometimes it was cold in my apartment and I didn’t want to strip down and start shivering needlessly. So I kept it simple and left on the outfit I wore to sleep the previous night. That’s right, my pj’s.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you are consistent. Don’t wear long pants, t shirt and sweatshirt one day, and rock nothing but tube socks the next. Capiche?

Lastly, it’s best to weigh in at about the same time every day. Preferably the morning because it’s before you eat (which might vary from one day to the next).

You get the idea. None of this should be groundbreaking.

More to come on my Fitbit next week. Stay tuned!