How I manage my Health in Podio

Posted: 2016-02-14

We've covered so many business applications using Podio and GlobiFlow, that I thought it's time to throw in some personal stuff. After all, I'm pretty sure that most of you use Podio for personal reasons too.

I was recently given a "Fit Bit", which just complicated life. It lied, it didn't encourage extra activity beyond what I was already doing, it was uncomfortable, and it added stress by having yet another thing that needs to be charged regularly (and would screw up my stats in a depressing way if I ever forget to charge it).

I have been tracking my health and physical activities in Podio for years now. After 30 days with the Fit Bit, I went back to my Podio App.

The biggest thing I learned was to keep it simple.

The Podio Setup

My App in Podio is pretty simple. The main fields I track are:

• Date
• Score for the Day (good, average, bad)
• Activity Selector (the good stuff)
• Indugences Selector (the bad stuff)

You'll notice that I've got Beer and Overeating as my indugences. You'd change this to whatever trips you up. Same goes for the Activity selector. Use things that you do, but keep it simple. I've got the 3 main categories of things I do at the gym.

This gives me a nice Score Card for each day.

All days start out as Neutral: N/A

If I've been good (ie I worked out and didn't indulge), I get a Good score.

If I've been bad (ie I didn't work out and indulged), I get a Bad score.

If I'm in the middle somewhere (ie I worked out and indulged), I get an Average score.

The Flows

There is not a lot of automation required to get this all to work.

The first Flow simply creates a new Health Score Card every day:

The second Flow is triggered whenever an Activity or Indulgence is changed, and calculates the Score accordingly:

That's basically it. Simple is the key here.

Adding a little Weight

Many of us are obsessed with the scale, and I have to admit I stand on one every now and then too. Why, I don't know, since it's almost always bad news.

But since I'm already tracking things daily in this app, it's easy to just add another field for weight:

I then added a small report tile in Podio to show the last 30 days:

And to be able to visualize trends, I added a simple chart:

And now I'm off on vacation, so I'll be coming back to 14 BAD scores and a chart that will be pointing to the sky :-)

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by Andreas Huttenrauch
Owner of Globi Web Solutions, and Podio Fanatic.

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