Re: Health Tracking...
By: poindexter FORTRAN to All on Sat Oct 17 2026 04:27 pm
I bought a Pixel watch almost 6 months back; I wanted to do some sleep tracking and keep track of my steps during my weight loss. I've consistently worn it to bed and understanding my physical state has been helpful.
The watch comes with 6 months of Google Health premium. It's got an AI feature and leans a little far into it, recommending what days to work out, which to take it easy, commenting about late-night eating... it's gotten a little tiresome.
I'm going to let the Premium account expire in a few days. I wonder, though - do we really need that much tracking in our lives? Do I need my watch to tell me that I shouldn't have had pizza at 11:00pm and should have gotten to sleep instead of finishing up work? There's a level of self-awareness that should suffice once you have a basic understanding of your body.
I think of an old saying in IT - don't measure what you're not going to track. The only metric I'm keeping records on is weight. Perhaps that, plus a dose of self-awareness is enough?
My wife used to wear a Fitbit for a while and mainly used it to track steps and sleep. I bought her an Apple Watch a couple of years ago and we were both surprised how much she loved it and she got much better tracking of steps/calories and sleep duration/quality. No subscriptions.
I've had sleep issues (apnea, RLS) for quite a while and was intereted in a sleep tracker but didn't like the idea of a watch (especially one that has to be recharged daily). My wife got me an Oura ring last Christmas and it's been great at tracking my sleep and activities (sometimes it blows my mind at how accurate its guesses are the actual physical activity) and I only have to recharge it once a week!
The biggest lesson I learned from my tracker: I consistently get about 90m less actual sleep than time in bed, even though I fall asleep very quickly. So if I really want to get 7-8 hours of sleep (I feel much better when I do), I actually need to be in bed closer to ten hours, which I never accounted for previously and was consistently sleep-deprived during the work week.
Do I really *need* the tracker? No, but I do think it's helped and as the technology improves and we get more metrics and fidelity, they'll just get better and better (and become more indespensible) over time.
I certainly would miss my tracker if I didn't have it. Much more so than my VR headset. :-)
--
digital man (rob)
Steven Wright quote #1:
I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
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