She waits for the bus, her shopping trolley standing to attention at her side, the scuffed tartan material marking times past. She looks old, worn but upright. Head up, shoulders back, there is still some fight in there and she definitely, defiantly, isn’t finished with life just yet. Her face is set straight and stoic, a woman of her time, deep wrinkles betray a life of laughter long gone.

As the leaves kick and hop along the gutter at her feet she pulls her long dark jacket around herself to block the winds sneaky fingers; she never feels warm these days, not properly.

There is still a chill in the air on this dull March morning; long grey clouds scroll overhead and a thin smear of rain softens the morning light, clinging to jackets, dripping from umbrellas. Red traffic lights create a crawling conga of cars as the morning news is delivered through a multitude of differing drones, each voice reflecting the weary sobriety as the world quietly continues its inevitable descent.

Out of the corner of my eye a flash of colour appears, yellow and red, as it zig-zags unevenly along the pavement; a toddler splashing in puddles with unhidden abandon. She launches into the next pool of water with both feet, water still flying as she lands and turns to look at her mother behind her, delight etched wide on her face. Under her hat, golden locks curl and tumble, tiny hands protrude from her coat as she claps them together with glee. A ray of light in hyper-action on this slow, flat morning.

The old lady waiting for the bus turns at the noise, the skin on her neck tightens with the movement as she looks for the source. Her eyes find the young girl, shining and bright on such a drab morning, and in her bus stop she smiles gently. The girl and her mother wander past, searching for the next puddle to explore on their journey.

I sit in my car, cocooned from the world, separated from the dull noise of the morning news by my view, a tiny moment of my day.

I watch as they smile, unknowing. The grey lady and the bright child. I wonder what they are thinking.

The car in front of me moves off and I follow obediently, leaving behind a glimpsed moment and unanswered questions. Such is the pattern of life.

Like it or loathe it, email is a fundamental part of most people’s lives. Managing your email account can be time draining battling and I’ve flirted with a variety of strategies to get to where I am today which is, for me, a practical way to keep on top of my email inboxes.

I have two email accounts. One for work. One for personal use. The latter includes different types of emails for different purposes; emails about websites I maintain, personal emails from family and friends, notifications from online accounts and everything else that tends to fall into most email inboxes every day.

How I use email

The ability to receive email on multiple devices is seen as a boon of the modern age. I’ve turned off email on my iPad to trying and change my usage pattern and that seems to have worked. I use my iPad for leisure activities almost exclusively these days so I’m keeping it, mostly, clean of anything even remotely related to “productivity”.

I only have two email accounts to make it easier for me to manage and I use a similar approach for both accounts; I read everything I need to read, action what I need to immediately and everything else goes to Todoist. The only differences between work and personal accounts are driven by the functionality available. For work I have one big long inbox in Outlook which emails stay in after triage, for personal use (which I prefer) I move anything I’ve actioned to the Google’s All Mail folder, which keeps my inbox also empty, but never quite zero.

For me the biggest change to how I used to handle email was to make decisions on each email. Either reply or action it immediately, store it away if it’s worth storing, set a reminder/task to look at it later, or delete it.

Yes, delete. Or at the very least mark it as read and move on. I’m a firm believer that if something is important it will bubble up again.

Inbox Zero

The slightly anal tidy freak in me loves this idea. A nice clean empty inbox at the end of every working session, that sense of achievement, that everything is cleaned away. Oh yes, Inbox Zero sounds great.

In reality I’m quite happy to use my inbox as a pseudo-task list. It might not hold the actual task but will hold relevant information that I need to action. That means at any given time there are a few emails in my inbox. It’s also a nice visual way to push me to take action on things that may have hovered around for a while; when my inbox gets to 10 or more it’s time to clear out down as much as I can.

When that time comes I’ll archive what I might need later, and delete the rest. I’ve always had grand plans of going through my GMail archive and moving information I want to keep to Evernote but, as yet, it’s not been pressing enough for me to do.

Email on iOS

Treating email as tasks, or at best reminders, is something I’ve been doing for a while, so when new email apps started to appear for iOS that were more focussed on that way of working I was keen to try them. The first one I tried, and the one that stuck for a long time, was Mailbox.

I love the idea of Mailbox, being able to triage my Gmail inbox, move emails to folders and have other emails ‘reappear’ when I want to action them was a useful way of keeping my inbox manageable. However, over time it became more of an overhead having two places that were acting as reminder services. ToDoist has richer functionality and as I started to adopt that more and more, ultimately Mailbox became just a separate app on my phone that I was using to access my personal email (it only connects to GMail).

For my work email I was using the default Mail app which did the job required perfectly well. However, with my use of Mailbox changing it soon became apparent that what I really needed was one email app on my phone that would let me manage both accounts.

I looked around at some other mail apps and ended up with CloudMagic purely because it allows me to view both my GMail and my work email in one place, and, unlike the default Mail app, the emails are easily distinguishable with a simple coloured sidebar denoting which account an email is from.

Bonus: CloudMagic recently updated to include support for both Pocket and Evernote making it easier to capture articles or information from my inboxes.

Controlling my email

Outside of the apps there is one more thing I’ve been trying recently, specifically during my working day. I’ve adapted some advice I read and I’m only checking my emails three times a day. Once when I get into the office in the morning when I triage anything that’s come in over night (working with teams in California and Indonesia means a lot of overnight emails), once just before lunch in case there is anything urgent needing dealt with, and once before I leave the office (or finish my working day if I’m at home).

For personal email, I try and use the same time slots but I’m a little more relaxed about those.

I don’t think there is a clean answer for dealing with email. By it’s very nature incoming email is not focused so the triage step is what works for me, and sticking with that gives me confidence I’m doing the right thing for any given email at any given time.

It only occurs to me now as I write this post that I’ve spent more time trying to figure out how to manage my email than any other part of my working, connected, life. I will continue to tweak things but a lot of my working habits haven’t changed in years… and you know what they say, if ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Trigger-alert: I am overweight, this post discusses my own issues and challenges with my diet, my self-image and my exercise regime.

In my, seemingly eternal, battle to lose weight I was recently quite pleasantly surprised to hear that my resting heart rate is 64 bpm which despite my fears, suggestions that I’m actually fairly fit (and yes, I’m aware that it’s not that simple a ratio but as one of many indicators I’m taking it as a good sign, small victories and all that).

Yet, despite that little boost to my ego, I’m still not happy with my health. I may be reasonably fit but that doesn’t hide the fact that I’m also overweight. Clinically, I am obese, a word that pulls in many emotional and negative connotations so I tend to stick with overweight (but not fat).

I’m tackling this all with the understanding that there is no quick fix here.

Tracking Food

I know why I’m overweight – ohh hey, here’s a secret, most people know why they are overweight! – but simply knowing why isn’t enough. Obviously it helps to understand and I’ve slowly put some practices, mental and physical, in place to help myself but even knowing what I’m doing wrong doesn’t stop me repeating my bad habits.

My diet isn’t too bad, I use portion control for the most part and try not to binge eat too much but I’m an emotional eater so need to watch myself when I’m running out of emotional energy or get too stressed (note to self: February 2014 is your textbook example of what NOT to do).

I know should cut down on eating fatty foods (hello pizza, burgers and chips) and I’ve recently started tracking everything I eat, good and bad, and that has already helped; not so much the data I’m collecting but the act of logging everything is a constant reminder so that when I next go to buy a Mars bar, I know I’ll need to log it… guilt can be a powerful ally!

Focussing on fitness

My weight is the main thing I need to change as it is putting strains and stresses on my joints, isn’t doing my blood pressure any good and, largely because I don’t like the way it makes me look. I’m pretty comfortable with my size on the whole, I’m just over 6’ tall so I ‘carry it well’ but I would feel a lot more confident if I could shift a few pounds.

A quick note. I’m just over 40 years old, I grew up with the imperial measuring systems – feet and inches, stones and pounds – but increasingly any interactions with health care professionals are (rightly) in metric. I’m 186cm tall and weight around 105kg.

I’m a goal oriented guy so to give myself a kick to get regular exercise I’ve set myself a goal of running 400km over the course of this year. It’s achievable, my knee should cope with it (I have a longstanding issue with my left leg that I am tackling with physio but which limits the distances I can run) and so far I’m pretty much on track despite only managing one run in February but, as I accounted for some downtime when setting the goal, I’m still confident of hitting the target.

But I need to exercise more and right now I’m trying to figure out what to try next.

Which exercise is right for me?

I like playing sports. I like being outdoors. I have never really been a fan of the gym as it’s the antithesis of the previous two points and, if I’m honest, I use that as an excuse not to go. I need to stop that but, as Winter turns to Spring I wonder if I need to bother with that right now.

At present I play basketball once a week for about 90 minutes (we have the court for two hours but play in rotation), and at present I’m managing about one run a week on average. I will start cycling to work again in a few weeks time too, or even just go out for a wee spin now and then. I’ve signed up for Pedal for Scotland, and I’m also aiming to spend a week cycling to Tollcross (about 50 mins cycle each way) during the Commonwealth Games.

Trends

If I can keep up the running and cycling those exercise activities, plus basketball, should give me enough cardio exercise so I need to look at other areas to get more exercise. That’s where the fun begins, which of the many current ‘trends’ should I try?

• Gorilla workout
• CrossFit
• P90X
• TRX
• Bootcamp
• 30 day Shred
• 7 Minute workout

The choice is endless, the list above is purely off the top of my head. Of them all, I’ve tried the 7 minute workout and might go back to it (better the devil you know), but if I can find an outdoor, local, Bootcamp I might sign up for that too.

Ultimately, things like CrossFit and P90X look too easy to ‘fail’ at, so my mindset (I don’t like to fail) will put me off them for the time being.

One item not on the list is Yoga. I’ll be honest and say it gives me the fear! I know I need to improve my flexibility and that it would help but finding a class that I think suits me has proven tricky. Or is that just another set of excuses?

Mind Over Matter

Ultimately I know that, as cliched as it sounds, I’m the only person that can make a difference to my weight. I have high blood pressure and get weighed as part of my attendance at the hyper-tension clinic every few months. I’m on medication to keep my blood pressure low but to get the dosage of that lowered, and so decrease the chances of my liver and kidneys getting screwed over by the meds, I need to do more to lower my weight.

My weight has been, for the last year, consistently just over 100kg. It peaked at 107kg and, unfortunately has never really headed back down the way. The challenge is to break the 100kg barrier and keep it below there. The first marker will be to get to 95kg (just under 15 stone) which will be significant as I don’t ever remember weighing anything other than 15 stone something or other … apologies for the metric vs imperial switching.

That 100kg line is proving a difficult one to break and I know it’s all down to my mental approach. I know I need to be patient and that over time the weight will drop, I know that weighing myself once a week and seeing 1kg lost is healthy and sustainable but that part of my brain is continually fighting against the heft of historical data that states “you are overweight”, and the longer that fight goes on, the harder it seems to be to break.

Fighting my own image

I am overweight. I will state that clearly even though I don’t like admitting it. I don’t like failing and being overweight is a very obvious and physical reminder, every single day, that I am failing.

Part of me knows that I should make peace with this, accept who I am and find a way to be comfortable with my body shape. I know I will never be a chiselled god with a rippling six-pack but I would like to be a different shape. I’m happy with most parts of my anatomy, I’m fairly confident I’ve got good legs, I just wish the “beer belly” wasn’t hanging above them.

So, I need to mix things up. I need to change things, really change things. Push myself and stop finding easy excuses (ohhh how easy this is to write!).

At the moment I’m considering revisiting the 7 minute workout. Whilst it is a ‘fad’ and evidence suggests that it’s not actually that effective on it’s own, I’m hoping that building the habit will be what benefits me in the long run, creating a mindset of ‘healthy’, and a lifestyle that supports that aim will finally see me affecting the change I’ve long desired.

I’ve past my 40th birthday, for so long a distant marker by which I’d have all this figured out. I haven’t. I’ve failed. But I’m not going down without a fight!!

I’ve not indulged in a tech/gadget post for a while, so forgive me (or don’t!).

The ever changing merry go round

I’ve mentioned before my strive for ‘better’. It’s a constant part of my life and, considering that I spend a lot of my life using my iPhone, that means I’m always on the look out for better ways to get things done.

Here’s my current home screen:

There is some notion to the arrangement of my iOS apps, although it’s the one thing I tweak quite often; ideally I’d be happy if there were an ‘auto-arrange by usage’ option as that’s how I try and group things on my home screen. That said, I do put some apps there to force usage, current example being Downcast. I’ve not really been a big podcast listener in the past, but I’m trying to nurture my growing love for spoken word radio, hence it’s current position on the home screen.

For the most often used iOS apps – email, tasks, calendars and various writing tools – there is a general theme for the apps I use most frequently, they work and sync across all of my tech (iPhone, iPad and MacBooks). Some are backed by Google technology (mail and calendars) but given I use my phone for both personal and work use, my system is deliberately built around those dual uses.

Read on for the full list…

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• Activity: Running
• Distance: 1.09 km
• Duration: 00:07:59
• Activity Link: http://runkeeper.com/user/gordongetsfit/activity/313498925