Week 4 got off to a strong start with Sunday’s combination of White Sox/Red Sox and the Paul McCartney show at Wrigley. Things slowed down by Friday, which was a work from home day. Saturday was a 13 hour day at the office, with some running back and forth between conference rooms.
I don’t know who I feel worse for, Tom Wilson or Len & Bob.
Things went a little better in week 2. I still need to get out and around more on non-game weekends. I worked from home on Monday and didn’t put shoes on all day, which is why that comes up as a great big zero. That said, I did pass the 5,000 step mark twice, which is an improvement from the previous week. Baby steps, my friends.
At work, we’ve started a “new program” that “encourages you to track your steps and help you to focus on your fitness in a simple and accessible way. The core component of Destination: You is the Tracker, which uses an accelerometer to accurately calculate the number of steps, distance walked, calories burned and time of activity.”
I thought I could use the motivation to get up and move around a bit more (and maybe even go to the gym), so I signed up. The results from week 1 were not exactly pretty.
We didn’t get the trackers until Tuesday afternoon, so that explains the low total there. According to The Walking Site, a sedentary person averages only 1,000 to 3,000 steps per day, and I am barely surpassing that. Of course, this doesn’t count any steps I take at home, since I don’t wear my shoes in the house, but I doubt that would provide any significant increase.
I guess I am posting this in order to shame myself into doing better and to track any progress I may make. They say 10,000 steps per day is a good guideline. After 1 week, I barely approached the halfway point.
Before you call me a ghoul, it isn’t the picture itself but the circumstances in which I first came across it. Sometime in 2000 or 2001, a friend and I were passing the work day by looking at everyone’s favorite website, AmIHotOrNot.com (is that even still around?). After going through a dozen girls dressed to the nines and trying to decide if they were in fact hot or not, this picture pops up. We laughed for a good 5-10 minutes due mostly to the absurdity of the picture being on the site.
The Nibble Theory and the Kernel of Power - Kaleel Jamison
The Nibble Theory is another “left on my desk at work” book that I’ve read while my laptop is booting up in the morning. I wasn’t sure if I should even count it, seeing as it clocks in at a whopping 74 pages, most of which have an illustration of some sort. But, rule #2 does say that “Any book counts as long as you’re not embarrassed to count it”, so here we are.
I guess you could say that the Nibble Theory is some new age, touchy feely claptrap, and you’d be right. It boils down to letting you know it is ok to grow as a person, even though others may try to put you down. If you need that kind of pick me up, I recommend therapy instead.
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan
A few years back, the leadership team of my area at work had a book club, and this was one of the selections. When my manager left a little more than a year ago and I moved into his old desk, I inherited the book. It sat on my desk for months, until earlier this year when I picked it up and started to read it 2-3 pages at a time as my laptop booted up and logged me into the network. The good news is that this was the perfect book for reading in this fashion, with many natural breaking points in each chapter as the focus switched between the authors delivering the information on how to “get things done” and their personal experiences around companies that did, and did not, succeed in doing so.
One quote that stuck out to me, which I would have tweeted had it been shorter than 140 characters, was “When I see companies that don’t execute, the chances are they don’t measure, don’t reward, and don’t promote people who know how to get things done.” This was right after the promotions at my company were announced and it did explain a lot about our current situation.
This is an actual work email received in the year 2011.
