Random Thoughts

I wrote The Push-up Experiment  earlier and got enough responses asking about the nerdy parts that I'm now writing this one. So, buckle-up and hold on, this could be a long nerdy ride. Tools Here are the tools that I used with links: Google Drive Forms Sheets IFTTT Date & Time Channel Pushover Channel Daily Push-up Notification Pushover Collecting the Data Google Drive allows you to build surveys and send them out; it's called "Google Forms". Your drive options might look a little different than mine but here's the gist of it. Create a new form and make a question for it. For the push-up survey I simply asked "How many push-ups did you do?" and left it as a "Text" type question. When you do this it shows up as a simple text box on the survey and when opened on the phone brings up the keyboard. One other thing I did was only allow for numbers to be entered into the text box because obviously I can't do "abcxyz&

I've found that when I'm able to visualize progress it motivates me. I'm not a productivity expert or a psychologist but this makes a lot of sense and I figured I'd share it even if you've heard it before. Since March 28th, I've been doing push-ups and tracking the number of push-ups I achieve in a spreadsheet. Yes, I know this completely classifies me as a total nerd, but I'm OK with that; I'm writing a blog post about my push-up spreadsheet, I'm well aware of the overall nerdiness going on here. I won't get into the nirty-gritty about how I used IFTTT  to send me a Google Drive survey every morning on my phone reminding me to do push-ups as well as providing a convenient place to simply enter the numbers. I won't go into the details about how that survey automatically goes into a Drive sheet and the graph (pictured below) automatically updates with each response. No, I won't go into that because I'm afraid that you will think