Some Waldman’s Blog – Finding Balance in the Flood of Information

A couple of weeks ago, our organization started its third “fitness challenge” since I have been there. It is a program from the Wellness Committee that tries to get people into the habit of a little exercise. Since it is already an important part of my life, this program shouldn’t be a big deal. But it has turned out to be an extra motivator to get me doing a little bit each day. The way it works is that people team up in groups of 5-8 to try to keep each other motivated. Each person earns 1 pt for the team for each 25-45 minutes of exercise each day of the week. Of course, it counts anything as exercise so as to be all inclusive, which I think is great.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a extra bonus. If each memeber of the team signed up for SparkPeople the team got bonus points. This site is a lot like Gyminee. But it has a lot more community and tracking functionality. For me, it adds a little competition to keep me motivated… it is like having someone else to answer to. It adds to the organization’s program, reinforcing that other people are looking out for you to keep moving.

In just the first few weeks, I have jumped to the top of the leaderboard for our organization. It is clear that people are not using this site to track their activities, which is fine. But it is a little disappointing. I had hoped the site could keep me motivated by having people to compete against. Yes, there are tons of other teams, but every other team has people completing 4 times the amount of exercise as me, which ironically is similar to the total amount of the 56 people in our the whole organization that have signed up. I can’t really compete with that.

So hopefully, I can find a way to make this a motivational tool – once I got to the top of the leaderboard, it lost it’s power. If I can’t get that power back, this will fall by the way side like lots of other social networking sites.