Five cool tools to improve your health

less productive. My name is doctor Ramantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. And this is How I Work, a show about how to help you do your best work. Long term listeners of How I Work will know the immense value I place on my health, because without your in place, I just think you have nothing. If you're not healthy, you can't be a great parent, a great friend, a great daughter, and so on. And you can be sure that your

productivity will be impacted too. So let's chat about five tools that I use to stay healthy. The first one is the Tangram Factory smartrope. Now I'll be linking to all these in the show notes. So This is a skipping rope that is smart, so it detects how many reps you're doing. I'm a big fan of skipping, and five times a week I love doing a short skipping warm up for a few minutes before my weight training workouts.

And as skippers will know, it's so tedious to count the number of reps that you do when you're skipping, but this smart rope does it for you, which I find awesome. So I have a little goal of doing two hundred reps on the skipping rope is my warm up. The smart rope connects to my phone via Bluetooth to a specific app and accounts it for me, which I love. So I've been using that for about a year. It's super reliable and I would find it really hard to

go back to using a normal rope. The next tool I want to talk about is one of the newer things that I've added to my repertoire, and that is the Woop band so Whop. I discovered Woop because it made Fast Companies Most Innovative Companies list this year. So Woop is a wearable device. It's basically a band made out of fabric that you wear on your wrist. It's waterproof and it only needs to be charged every five days, and it's designed to basically optimize the way that you

sleep and the way that you train. The Woop band is unusual and that it's got no screen on it. It's just a band, so in order to understand the data that it's getting from you, you need to actually open up the Woop mobile app to check it out. So Woop tracks a few things. That tracks heart rate variability, resting heart rate, your sleep, and your respiratory rate. And with these particular markets, it can assess how well you're sleeping.

Your sleep efficiency optimizes how much time you need to be spending in bed, and based on this data and your activity levels from the day before, it calculates ideally how hard you should push yourself the following day, or whether perhaps you need to schedule a recovery date. And then you could run mini experiments with yourself to see how doing certain things like maybe having a glass of wine at night impacts your sleep, although you probably already

know the answer to that one. So there's heaps of data, and the more that you use it, the more useful the data becomes. Because it starts to set baselines and averages, and interestingly, I was reading that it's actually very accurate but predicting whether you have COVID. So there you go. That's whoop. Now the next thing. I have been using an Apple Watch for many years, but something that used to straight me about my Apple Watch is that I have a goal of doing at least ten thousand steps

a day. But you can't actually set that up on your home screen to have the number of steps that you've done on the standard Apple Watch setup. But there is a workaround, and that is with the Pedometer plus plus app. So if you install that particular app on your phone, you can then set the home screen of your Apple Watch to show how many steps that you've done.

And I find this little work around very very useful because it helps me just make sure that I build in regular movement to my day to day to reach my goal, which is a good segue into the next thing I want to talk about, which is the walking pad pro treadmill and Ergo desk automatic standing desk. So this is a treadmill desk and I mentioned it in

the episode that I did about my ultimate home office setup. Now, I don't use this as my main work desk, but I have a second workstation at home, and I think of this my movement desk, where I've got my old laptop set up that I only use now when I travel on rare occasions, and I can basically walk and work at the same time, or if I'm doing phone meetings. I have a general rule where I will always walk if I'm doing phone meetings or move in some way.

And this is really handy. That's desk because now I can take notes on my laptop while I walk on the treadmill, which is super cool. And again, it just helps me move and stay healthy during my work day, which if I don't try to build in all these habits, can be very sedentary because I am a classic desk worker. Now, the final tool I want to talk about is something to stay mentally healthy. And this is a company that

I love called Magic Puzzle Company. So I discovered them through their Kickstarter campaign where they launch three jigsaw puzzles that each have a secret when you get to the end, and I'm not going to tell you what that secret is, but it's very cool. I'm onto the third of the three puzzles now and I can tell you I'm going to be very depressed when I finish this last one because they've been such a joy for myself and my

seven year old daughter Frankie to do together. They're one thousand pieces and they're very very challenging, I will say, and they've become a mainstay on my dining room table, so whenever family and friends come to visit, they're always invited to contribute to doing the jigsaw puzzles. I think the jigsaw puzzles are such a great way to stretch your brain, and I also find that I get into

chicksaw flow quite easily and I just love it. So I don't know what I'm going to do when I finish this third puzzle, but the mas Chick Puzzle company who created these jigsaws are working on the next series, so stay tuned for that. So those are five tools that I used to stay healthy. That is it for today's show. If you have been loving how I work, you might also enjoy MoMA MIA's podcast Lady Startup Stories.

Each week, Georgia Love, who you might remember from The Bachelorette, sits down with female entrepreneur to ask how they've built their businesses. Georgia recently sat down with Michelle Battersby, the woman who helped launch the dating app Bumble into Australia. But Michelle isn't here to talk Bumble. She is actually co founding an app called Sunroom, so she joins Georgia to talk about why she left a very secure job to go out on her own and why she thought

Sunroom was worth taking a risk on. Here's a little snippet.

But we did this thing called a co founder dating Questionnaire, and I think it was around seventy five questions, and it gets into some really deep stuff, things like can

one co founder fire another? Would you prefer to own eight percent of a billion dollar company or eighty percent of a one hundred million dollar company, big goal type stuff, but questions you really should be asking your co founders and things you really should know about each other before you decide to enter a business, like what is the worst interpersonal conflict you've ever dealt with? What makes you feel stressed? How do you deal with stress? Have you

ever dealt with depression? Like a lot of big questions, And we did a couple of sessions all going through how we'd answered these questions to really get to know one another, and our values were just so aligned. We're three actually very different people, but our values are all the same. And yeah, yeah, it's crazy to think that we have never been in the same room and we just closed a preceed and are about to launch it up.