January 2012
11 posts
Watch
Meet Drinking Problems, our newest (and most...
habitlabs:
Oh, this poor snail. If only someone could just… tell him to not drink so much every time he checks in at a bar on Foursquare.
Introducing Drinking Problems, the newest bud.ge program.
Do you 1) hang out at bars with your friends 2) check in there on Foursquare 3) get way too drunkles while there? Want to take a vacation from hangovers? This is the program for you!
Explore the...
2 tags
New Habit Labs side project: gonnatry.com
I had an idea the other day and had to built it…
It’s called Gonna Try and it’s sort of a super-simple hybrid of 43 Things and Health Month. It’s freeform like 43 Things, but it’s rooted in actual attempts to make a change right now, like Health Month.
The added twist is that I ask you *how* you plan to do this thing that you want to do (apps, services, gadgets,...
2 tags
My problem with listing 3 things I'm grateful for
Almost every recent book on positive psychology (Flourish, Redirect, and The Happiness Advantage to name a few off the top of my head) mention one exercise that has been proven in studies time and again to have not only immediate positive effects, but also effects that last for months after the exercise has ended. The exercise is to list 3 things you’re grateful for every day.
I’m an...
No biggie
The multiverse, the universe, the world, history, everyone alive, your friends and family, you, your behavior, what you are doing right now. You can only change one of these things, and it’s not easy, and you’ll probably fail the first 38,000 times, but by eventually changing it you indirectly change all of the others. After figuring that out, the only remaining problem is figuring out...
2 tags
I'm #interested in #lifelongprojects
Interest stats:
Interested since: 2006
Looking for a mentor: Nah
Willing to mentor: In a minor way
Level of interest: 4
Level of mastery: 3
Story:
Strangely, my interest in the particular topic started with an obsession with a song, which started with an experience. If I may quote myself from January 4th, 2006:
This weekend I was walking to a bar or something with a friend and we walked...
2 tags
I'm #interested in #habits
Interest stats:
Interested since: 2010
Looking for mentorship: Yes
Willing to mentor: Yes
Level of interest: 9
Level of mastery: 4
Origin story
Habits are an interesting little corner of behavior change. They are the behaviors that have somehow become ingrained in our subconscious. They are programs in our brain that we do without thinking.
Of course, that is largely a myth. Even...
1 tag
2011's most replied-to tweets
This last year I played a little game with myself, trying to post a tweet a week that I thought might possibly get more replies than the previous record. It’s an idea that Ze Frank threw out at a talk at SXSW last year… and it stuck with me as a fun experiment in the world of engagement and Tweet-making. I tried to stay away from Twitter-specific tweets, as those are artificially...
2 tags
Interested in #mentoring
Interest stats:
Interested since: 2011
Looking for mentorship: Got one! Diana Kimball.
Willing to mentor: Not quite yet.
Level of interest: 8
Level of mastery: 1
Origin story:
This just all of a sudden jumped onto my zeitgeist last year, as a strategy for self-improvement that I hadn’t really considered before. Diana Kimball started this cool /mentoring movement that got me excited....
2 tags
Interested in #behaviorchange
Interest stats:
Interested since: 2000
Looking for mentorship: Yes
Willing to mentor: Yes
Level of interest (0-10): 10
Level of mastery (0-10): 7
Origin story:
Behavior change is the holy grail of my life’s work. I think that’s the most grandiose way to put it (and why not be grandiose?). From my early interest in building recommendation systems at Amazon (2000-2004), to my...
1 tag
Cultivating interests in 2012
New year resolution thoughts, in no particular order.
Rather than making goals or resolutions this year, I’m going to be more intentional about cultivating specific interests.
My current interests are:
Behavior change
Habits
Mentoring, and being mentored (inspired by Diana Kimball)
“Good” gamification
Life lists
Non-violent communication
Radical honesty
Transparency...
December 2011
7 posts
Numbers from my life in 2011
I posted 4,014 entries, photos, tweets, etc for a total of 23,038 words
Most of my actual wordy blogging happened on Tumblr (12,833 words)
I did my 8:36pm photo 356 out of 365 days (here they are)
I posted 73 things to Tumblr, 2,389 tweets, 237 Foursquare checkins, and 517 photos to Flickr.
I checked in with 165 different people. Top 13: Kellianne (580 times), Niko (382 times),...
A Note From HBO, But Not From The Future →
parislemon:
Jeremy Toeman responds to my letter to HBO (to let me pay for HBO Go without requiring that I pay for cable). He makes a number of solid points as to why the economics simply will not work right now.
But the keywords are “right now”.
I have no doubt that HBO is in no hurry to walk away from their cable partners who not only send them billions, but handle all the logistics...
Simplifying.
habitlabs:
Jump on in the Budge waiting room if you’re not already! We’re going to be letting a bunch of people in right after Christmahanukwanza.
Simulationism
The best case I can think of against the existence of God is that the universe doesn’t seem to have very many other examples of a single point of failure, top-down, authority. Even “queen bees” and ants and those things are not so much in charge as specialized to a particular task (which isn’t management). In general, queens and kings are just too vulnerable to survive very...
3 tags
The interface to our subconscious
You know how sometimes you’re hungry and you start wondering to yourself, “What am I in the mood for?” This process of one part of the brain asking another part of the brain a question is something we all do a lot, and it struck me the other day that there was actually something really interesting and beautiful about how it works.
What’s happening here, anyway? Let me try...
Chris DeVore: Software With Soul →
habitlabs:
The explicit goal of the creative minds behind these projects is to develop an authentic, sustained, empathetic relationship with the end-user — to make their customers feel powerful, magical and cared for by their software.
Caring As A Service. In a way, it seems so obvious, and yet, still so very rare. This is the tiny dent I hope to make in the universe.
“Neoteny, one of my favorite words, means the retention of childlike attributions...”
– Joi Ito, “The Internet, Innovation, and Learning”
Relevant to my interests on multiple levels.
November 2011
2 posts
Github Punchcards
habitlabs:
What does the little known Github Punchcard graph tell you, in terms of your work habits?
Here’s Adam’s, showing when he made commits:
“I start big coding projects early in the week, eat dinner between 7 and 9pm, and don’t like to do any work on Saturdays.” The checkins on Sundays have only appeared in the past two months, as work as gotten a little more intense and the summer...
October 2011
5 posts
1 tag
18 years ago
18 years ago today my father passed away from complications from lung cancer.
Having recently moved, I re-read some letters my sister, mother, and I had written him while he was in the hospital. I re-read the essay I wrote about him in college. I re-read the essay my grandfather wrote about him. I cried.
I still think about him all the time. Especially now that I have a son. It’s...
4 tags
Forcing it
Thoughts in no particular order, spiraling into a weird place by the end…
I’m trying to eat a salad every day for lunch.
Like many other things, it brings me face-to-face with the challenge of controlling my behavior outside the realm of habits.
What exactly am I “forcing” the change against?
Dopamine.
Like Pavlov’s dog, we have each been conditioned through...
September 2011
7 posts
1 tag
Twitter for secret agents and telepaths
In no particular order (except maybe not really).
Tiny, bluetooth one-ear headphones.
Secret personal phone number.
Always-on phone call.
Double-sided mute, 99% of the time.
Whisper “pineapple bottom sparkly pants” (or your own specified pass phrase) to activate 5-second window of speaking that goes out to everyone who subscribes to you.
Ender’s Game.
You hear 5-seconds of...
1 tag
Thoughts on Downtown Project
In no particular order.
Downtown Project, Tony Hsieh’s giant bold attempt to transform downtown Las Vegas into the next Austin meets tech-utopia slash Zapposland, just blew my mind.
He’s definitely channeling Walt Disney a bit here, with a modern twist.
Paul Carr is starting his new company there.
Michael Arrington is also quite interested in it.
I have a long and deep interest in...
1 tag
Thoughts on Facebook's Timeline
In no particular order:
For a timeline, it’s remarkably difficult to scan.
FINALLY, a way to browse the archive (Though, Twitter and most other social network sites don’t really do a good job of this. Last place to do it semi-okay was Livejournal… I’ve used their archive successfully many a time.)
It’s going to be REALLY interesting to watch what happens when...
1 tag
Habit Labs: Response to Gabe and Sebastian's... →
habitlabs:
A VERY interesting debate has been going on this last week primarily between Gabe Zichermann, author of the new book by O’Reilly called “Gamification by Design”, and Sebastian Deterding, PhD researcher on user experience, persuasive and gameful design. Read the whole tamale…
Trying to add something constructive to the debate…
Disrupt, Disruption, and the Nobility of the Tech... →
Great post, Rick. I agree with the first 2 movements, but think the 3rd (quoted below) is far from over.
rickwebb:
To me, though, education, health care, the environment and government are probably the big ones. The ones where making a difference would truly make a difference. But the thing about those is that these dragons which we ponder battling are exponentially larger, more entrenched and...
A photo tour of Habit Labs HQ →
habitlabs:
About time for a tour of the Habit Labs HQ. It is a work-wonderland, where we all have labcoats (though we generally handle no liquids beyond coffee and tea).
Whiteboards and drawings and tagboards abound. Buster and Amelia draw diagrams on big pads of paper. (Right now we’re working on…
Click through for more pictures!
August 2011
15 posts
This cosmic grizzly bear wants to eat you
Adult grizzly bears weigh more than 800 pounds and can run at a speed of over 30 miles per hour. Our average life expectancy is currently about 78.7 years. If it helps, you can imagine that the moment you were borh, a cosmic grizzly bear was placed 20,696,526 miles out in space, about 22% of the way to the sun, and this lovely hungry bear was told to run as fast as she can towards you. So...
1 tag
/mentoring →
msg:
dianakimball:
Introducing a distributed mentoring movement.
In college, I studied history. I researched amateur magician communities at the turn of the twentieth century and read all about Soviet department stores. But mostly, I was fascinated by the history of technology. And halfway through college, I looked up and realized that history was happening around me: that the internet was...
Health Month: Come and get it! Private rules and... →
healthmonth:
Happy Monday, friendly Health Monthers! Are you ready for September? To help, we’re launching a couple great new features today that I think you’ll like.
For a long time, the most requested feature on our UserVoice Forum has been the lack of more than one ‘custom’ rule.
Until now, we’ve…
Stoked to finally get these super highly requested features out there. Help us spread...
2 tags
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever...”
– STEVE JOBS, in a commencement address at Stanford, 2005.
(via the Wall Street Journal)
Sadness fills me about all of this.
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
– Clay Shirky
Just chatting with a friend and fellow healthcare innovator. A super talented, smart guy with a really elegant solution that every employer in the US should want. However, disrupting the price transparency issue of healthcare is pretty much impossible. That quote pretty much sums up a...
7 tags
“Our new project, in development now, will become your very own personal health...”
– - Me, sounding a little excited in the awesome GeekWire article about us.
We’re going to be doing a series of small tests with people who sign up at bud.ge. We’ve done 2 so far, and it’s been really fun to start a product from its most primal axiom: that we want to help people...
3 tags
Announcing Habit Labs!
I have something very exciting to tell you! (I love when I can start a post with that line.)
My one-man shop, Health Month, started almost exactly a year ago, is growing! I’ve merged my company into Jen McCabe’s Contagion Health, and formed a new company called Habit Labs!
Also, we raised some money!
And also, people are writing about us!
GeekWire: Y Combinator-backed Contagion...
“Problems can often be too difficult to solve in the terms (or the setting) in...”
– Natural Stress Relief and Transcendental Meditation Forum: Desires and problems (via ario)
Suddenly I like the word “transcendental” more. Wish it wasn’t 85% bad connotation to me though.
Yesterday I had a visceral reaction at one point to the “muddled” nature of...
Ryan Freitas: 35 Lessons in 35 Years →
My father always told me that the day we stop learning is the day we die. I wrote this as a sort of preparation for my 35th birthday last week. Some of these are poignant, others are simply trite; I attribute the latter to my growing sense of sentimentality as I age. That, and I need an editor.
…
I missed this post last year but just got a lot out of it. Thanks, Mr. Freitas! I’ll...
On being watched
What makes you want to watch something?
You are entertained by it
You care for it
You’re afraid of it
You expect something from it
You are partially responsible for it
Who watches you?
Family and friends
Businesses trying to sell you something
The government, making sure you don’t do anything illegal
People who like you or want to meet you
People who are threatened by you
...
July 2011
7 posts
You are not running out of time →
I wish I had written this post. Well told, Rahul Bijlani!
