#2: Will the Apple Watch make you exercise?

This was sent originally in #2 of my newsletter. If you want to see more like this consider subscribing here:

I was about 6 editions considering if I should buy an Apple Watch or not. I have a lot of Apple products. But I only buy them if it makes sense. For all these years I did not find any use of the Apple Watch worth the price. Until now.

This year I started cycling more regularly. I started tracking my rides with the iPhone app Strava, to see my progress and my achievements. The main problem is that I was not having real-time information about what I was doing. I am worried to have my phone in the handlebar, in case I fall and I break the iPhone. So what I was doing was: I start the ride in Strava, store the phone in my bag, and stopped it when finish riding.

With the Apple Watch, I get real-time metrics on my wrist. It’s like a video game, where you fight against yourself. When I was young I spent hours playing Gran Turismo trying to beat my times. It felt this way while doing exercise, which made it as addictive as a video game. Was the fact of wearing a new watch motivating me to exercise more?

Since I have my Apple Watch I've seen myself moving more. Even if it's only to close my daily circles of activity. Every time you see the time in your wrist you see the circles: "You did not exercise enough today. You did not stand up enough today.". Sometimes you ignore it, but sometimes this guilty feeling gets your butt off the chair.

I still feel that what you can do with the watch is really limited, but if you want to be more fit it's a first starting point. You will have an external trigger to remind you of your fitness habits.

How to take smart notes

Last year I read a lot of books about writing, taking notes, and self-development. How To Take Smart Notes is an exceptional one. The book is the best introduction to the Zettelkasten method. This method helps you organize your ideas and learnings.

What I like the most is how the method links one idea to another. Linking ideas is really powerful. Is not the first time that an idea that I read in a business book can be applied to solve a problem in my engineering team. Also combining ideas from two different fields — also known as idea sex — can lead to unexpected results.

A quote from the book:

By focusing on what is interesting and keeping written track of your own intellectual development, topics, questions and arguments will emerge from the material without force. Not only does it means that finding a topic or a research question will become easier, as we don’t have to squeeze it out of the few ideas that are on top of our head anymore, every question that emerges out of our slip-box

¹

will naturally and handily come with material to work with.

Even if the original Zettelkasten is to use it with index cards, there is a lot of youtube tutorials on how to do it with Roam, Notion, or any modern-day software. Give it a try.

Why sharing emotions with other is so appealing?

Human beings are generally highly motivated to maintain, cultivate and expand this shared emotional attunement to our surroundings. Just think about watching a sporting event and cheering for the same team with your friends, practising a religion together, sharing a pastime with others, or even just making idle gossip.

In this article, Hayden Kee explains how a 18-month-old child starts pointing to start developing an emotional connection with an adult.

Are threads the new blog posts?

Fabrizio has two indie apps that I use all the time: Mailbrew (to receive a daily digest of news, tweets and other) and Typefully (a tool to create Twitter threads). Last week he wrote this article about Twitter threads. He talks about the trend of creating long threads, and how people may be consuming more Twitter threads than blog posts. The good and the bad of this trend.

Even if I enjoy Twitter threads I think blog posts still have a long life, but is a good debate to start. Are Twitter threads a threat for long-form articles?

The Tesla Bot: Explained

Tesla presented a human-looking robot. But don't worry, the company states that you can outrun them because they only can walk at 5km/h. Ok. Will Smith, be prepared, Sonny will be a Tesla Bot.

Jokes aside, Tesla presented a robot to get rid of boring tasks. In this video, MKBHD opens an interesting conversation:

We have already a lot of single-purpose robots in our life that don’t have a human shape for eficiency. If you want a vacuum cleaner robot you don’t have a human robot with a vacuum cleaner, you have a Roomba. The dishwasher is efficiently constructed to wash dishes, and that’s it. These things are designed to solve one problem very well. Is it efficient having a robot with a human shape?

If you find this useful, entertaining or simply want to help grow the newsletter you can share it with the button below:

See you next week!

1. Slip-box is where you store all the ideas. The original method was using index cards stored in a box.