If you know me, you’ll know I live by my Apple Watch. For 4.5 years, I’ve worn it pretty much every single day. It’s my single biggest motivator.
There are 3 goals to achieve each day: Move (active calories burned), Exercise (minutes of brisk activity), and Stand (hours with at least a minute of standing).
I take these pretty seriously: I’ve hit my Move goal 96% of the time — 1559 out of 1629 days — and Exercise and Stand 93% of the time.
But this isn’t a post about health or fitness.
I’ve become fascinated with the design and purpose of each of these goals and how they work together. I want to share what they’ve taught me about productivity, motivation and getting things done — and what we can all learn from them.
💪 Move
The harder you work in life, the more you’ll achieve. And the harder you work, the quicker you’ll get stuff done. More is more. Sometimes that’s just true.
But it can’t be true all the time. Working at your hardest isn’t a fixed threshold. And quantity isn’t always the most valuable objective.
My best Move day has been 2,073 calories, and my daily average is 608. Since my paternity leave, I’ve lowered my goal to 400. I still want the motivation to keep active every day, but this goal isn’t the most important thing to me right now.
There’s no point setting overambitious goals if you’re going to burn out or risk compromising something else in order to achieve them.
Lesson: stretch yourself, but pace yourself.
⏳ Exercise
Some things can’t be rushed. Above a certain threshold, a minute is a minute, no matter how you hard you work during it.
I find this helpful to remind myself to be patient at times. It’s frustrating when an intense period of effort doesn’t immediately get the results you think it deserves. But some things compound more slowly. Quality takes time.
Building relationships. Developing your personal brand. Practicing new skills. No matter how intensely you work, these things won’t transform overnight. More effort will pay off, but it’s a long-term game. You just have to put the time in and keep going.
Lesson: keep at it and have faith.
🔁 Stand
This goal is the great regulator. The requirement is to stand for 1 minute in every hour. You could keep standing, but you’d get the same credit either way. Why spend 60 minutes on something when 1 minute will do the job?
There’s always a place for going above and beyond. But how long can you keep doing that for? What else could you have been doing with those other 59 minutes after you’d already banked the benefit?
This goal rewards consistency. A small amount of effort, applied regularly, all adds up.
Lesson: work pragmatically and know when to move on.
None of these approaches works healthily in isolation — it’s about finding equilibrium between your own motivation and achieving results. But I’ve found this approach useful in finding balance between working hard, working patiently, and working consistently.