Speaker 1: Did you exercise this morning or are you planning on
Speaker 1: exercising later today, or maybe you're doing your exercise right
Speaker 1: now with me in your ear, or maybe you just
Speaker 1: told yourself that you didn't have time. Now, How I
Speaker 1: Work has not turned into a health and fitness podcast,
Speaker 1: but today I want to talk about some call tools
Speaker 1: to improve your health. I place a huge value on
Speaker 1: my health. It's actually my number one priority because if
Speaker 1: you're not healthy, chances are you are a whole lot
Speaker 1: less productive. My name is doctor Ramantha Imba. I'm an
Speaker 1: organizational psychologist and founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. And
Speaker 1: this is How I Work, a show about how to
Speaker 1: help you do your best work. Long term listeners of
Speaker 1: How I Work will know the immense value I place
Speaker 1: on my health, because without your in place, I just
Speaker 1: think you have nothing. If you're not healthy, you can't
Speaker 1: be a great parent, a great friend, a great daughter,
Speaker 1: and so on. And you can be sure that your
Speaker 1: productivity will be impacted too. So let's chat about five
Speaker 1: tools that I use to stay healthy. The first one
Speaker 1: is the Tangram Factory smartrope. Now I'll be linking to
Speaker 1: all these in the show notes. So This is a
Speaker 1: skipping rope that is smart, so it detects how many
Speaker 1: reps you're doing. I'm a big fan of skipping, and
Speaker 1: five times a week I love doing a short skipping
Speaker 1: warm up for a few minutes before my weight training workouts.
Speaker 1: And as skippers will know, it's so tedious to count
Speaker 1: the number of reps that you do when you're skipping,
Speaker 1: but this smart rope does it for you, which I
Speaker 1: find awesome. So I have a little goal of doing
Speaker 1: two hundred reps on the skipping rope is my warm up.
Speaker 1: The smart rope connects to my phone via Bluetooth to
Speaker 1: a specific app and accounts it for me, which I love.
Speaker 1: So I've been using that for about a year. It's
Speaker 1: super reliable and I would find it really hard to
Speaker 1: go back to using a normal rope. The next tool
Speaker 1: I want to talk about is one of the newer
Speaker 1: things that I've added to my repertoire, and that is
Speaker 1: the Woop band so Whop. I discovered Woop because it
Speaker 1: made Fast Companies Most Innovative Companies list this year. So
Speaker 1: Woop is a wearable device. It's basically a band made
Speaker 1: out of fabric that you wear on your wrist. It's
Speaker 1: waterproof and it only needs to be charged every five days,
Speaker 1: and it's designed to basically optimize the way that you
Speaker 1: sleep and the way that you train. The Woop band
Speaker 1: is unusual and that it's got no screen on it.
Speaker 1: It's just a band, so in order to understand the
Speaker 1: data that it's getting from you, you need to actually
Speaker 1: open up the Woop mobile app to check it out.
Speaker 1: So Woop tracks a few things. That tracks heart rate variability,
Speaker 1: resting heart rate, your sleep, and your respiratory rate. And
Speaker 1: with these particular markets, it can assess how well you're sleeping.
Speaker 1: Your sleep efficiency optimizes how much time you need to
Speaker 1: be spending in bed, and based on this data and
Speaker 1: your activity levels from the day before, it calculates ideally
Speaker 1: how hard you should push yourself the following day, or
Speaker 1: whether perhaps you need to schedule a recovery date. And
Speaker 1: then you could run mini experiments with yourself to see
Speaker 1: how doing certain things like maybe having a glass of
Speaker 1: wine at night impacts your sleep, although you probably already
Speaker 1: know the answer to that one. So there's heaps of data,
Speaker 1: and the more that you use it, the more useful
Speaker 1: the data becomes. Because it starts to set baselines and averages,
Speaker 1: and interestingly, I was reading that it's actually very accurate
Speaker 1: but predicting whether you have COVID. So there you go.
Speaker 1: That's whoop. Now the next thing. I have been using
Speaker 1: an Apple Watch for many years, but something that used
Speaker 1: to straight me about my Apple Watch is that I
Speaker 1: have a goal of doing at least ten thousand steps
Speaker 1: a day. But you can't actually set that up on
Speaker 1: your home screen to have the number of steps that
Speaker 1: you've done on the standard Apple Watch setup. But there
Speaker 1: is a workaround, and that is with the Pedometer plus
Speaker 1: plus app. So if you install that particular app on
Speaker 1: your phone, you can then set the home screen of
Speaker 1: your Apple Watch to show how many steps that you've done.
Speaker 1: And I find this little work around very very useful
Speaker 1: because it helps me just make sure that I build
Speaker 1: in regular movement to my day to day to reach
Speaker 1: my goal, which is a good segue into the next
Speaker 1: thing I want to talk about, which is the walking
Speaker 1: pad pro treadmill and Ergo desk automatic standing desk. So
Speaker 1: this is a treadmill desk and I mentioned it in
Speaker 1: the episode that I did about my ultimate home office setup. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't use this as my main work desk, but
Speaker 1: I have a second workstation at home, and I think
Speaker 1: of this my movement desk, where I've got my old
Speaker 1: laptop set up that I only use now when I
Speaker 1: travel on rare occasions, and I can basically walk and
Speaker 1: work at the same time, or if I'm doing phone meetings.
Speaker 1: I have a general rule where I will always walk
Speaker 1: if I'm doing phone meetings or move in some way.
Speaker 1: And this is really handy. That's desk because now I
Speaker 1: can take notes on my laptop while I walk on
Speaker 1: the treadmill, which is super cool. And again, it just
Speaker 1: helps me move and stay healthy during my work day,
Speaker 1: which if I don't try to build in all these habits,
Speaker 1: can be very sedentary because I am a classic desk worker. Now,
Speaker 1: the final tool I want to talk about is something
Speaker 1: to stay mentally healthy. And this is a company that
Speaker 1: I love called Magic Puzzle Company. So I discovered them
Speaker 1: through their Kickstarter campaign where they launch three jigsaw puzzles
Speaker 1: that each have a secret when you get to the end,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to tell you what that secret is,
Speaker 1: but it's very cool. I'm onto the third of the
Speaker 1: three puzzles now and I can tell you I'm going
Speaker 1: to be very depressed when I finish this last one
Speaker 1: because they've been such a joy for myself and my
Speaker 1: seven year old daughter Frankie to do together. They're one
Speaker 1: thousand pieces and they're very very challenging, I will say,
Speaker 1: and they've become a mainstay on my dining room table,
Speaker 1: so whenever family and friends come to visit, they're always
Speaker 1: invited to contribute to doing the jigsaw puzzles. I think
Speaker 1: the jigsaw puzzles are such a great way to stretch
Speaker 1: your brain, and I also find that I get into
Speaker 1: chicksaw flow quite easily and I just love it. So
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm going to do when I
Speaker 1: finish this third puzzle, but the mas Chick Puzzle company
Speaker 1: who created these jigsaws are working on the next series,
Speaker 1: so stay tuned for that. So those are five tools
Speaker 1: that I used to stay healthy. That is it for
Speaker 1: today's show. If you have been loving how I work,
Speaker 1: you might also enjoy MoMA MIA's podcast Lady Startup Stories.
Speaker 1: Each week, Georgia Love, who you might remember from The Bachelorette,
Speaker 1: sits down with female entrepreneur to ask how they've built
Speaker 1: their businesses. Georgia recently sat down with Michelle Battersby, the
Speaker 1: woman who helped launch the dating app Bumble into Australia.
Speaker 1: But Michelle isn't here to talk Bumble. She is actually
Speaker 1: co founding an app called Sunroom, so she joins Georgia
Speaker 1: to talk about why she left a very secure job
Speaker 1: to go out on her own and why she thought
Speaker 1: Sunroom was worth taking a risk on. Here's a little snippet.
Speaker 2: It's crazy to say, Ellie, Lucy and I have never
Speaker 2: met each other in real life. Wow wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So they're both in the States and I'm here. So
Speaker 2: the company is actually based in la and I'm moving
Speaker 2: over there in a month. But it's very twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: We've co founded a business without ever meeting each other
Speaker 2: in real life, and I think it's been an advantage
Speaker 2: because it meant that Lucy could pick the skill sets
Speaker 2: that she needed and then go and find those people.
Speaker 2: But we did this thing called a co founder dating Questionnaire,
Speaker 2: and I think it was around seventy five questions, and
Speaker 2: it gets into some really deep stuff, things like can
Speaker 2: one co founder fire another? Would you prefer to own
Speaker 2: eight percent of a billion dollar company or eighty percent
Speaker 2: of a one hundred million dollar company, big goal type stuff,
Speaker 2: but questions you really should be asking your co founders
Speaker 2: and things you really should know about each other before
Speaker 2: you decide to enter a business, like what is the
Speaker 2: worst interpersonal conflict you've ever dealt with? What makes you
Speaker 2: feel stressed? How do you deal with stress? Have you
Speaker 2: ever dealt with depression? Like a lot of big questions,
Speaker 2: And we did a couple of sessions all going through
Speaker 2: how we'd answered these questions to really get to know
Speaker 2: one another, and our values were just so aligned. We're
Speaker 2: three actually very different people, but our values are all
Speaker 2: the same. And yeah, yeah, it's crazy to think that
Speaker 2: we have never been in the same room and we
Speaker 2: just closed a preceed and are about to launch it up.
Speaker 1: You can listen to Lady Startup Stories with Georgia Love
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. So that is it for
Speaker 1: today and I will see you next time.