Life Hacks 102 - #007

**Chris Williamson** (0:01)
Hi, friends. So today's episode is a little bit late, and I ended up having to chase around every hard drive that I had in an effort to try and track down where this recording had gone to after the original one got corrupted. Apple, Time Machine, you have absolutely saved my life. However, it has taken me 18 hours to work out how to make it work, but we're here.
Lifehacks 102, I'm sitting down with Jonny and Yusef again from Propane Fitness. Expect to find out how you can track your sleep using the alarm clock that you set every night before you go to bed and how you can conduct an experiment on your own sleeping patterns so that you can improve them. Learn how to set and maintain good meditation habits. If that's something that you're wanting to try, you've always wanted to. Maybe you've had a couple of cracks and you haven't been able to make it stick. We've got the tips and tricks for you in here. And finally, my favorite of the bunch. And I'm absolutely gutted that I didn't come up with it while we were recording because I've used it and sung its praises for so long. But it's something that everybody needs to do with their trackpad speed on the laptop. So make sure that you stay listening right until the end and find out what that is. I promise you it will change your life overnight. It is an absolute game changer. So here we go. Lifehacks102, bring on the mind gains.

**Jonny** (1:29)
Yeah, so there's optimizing on top of a structure that is ineffective.

**Chris Williamson** (1:36)
Okay.

**Jonny** (1:37)
And there's making a effective process more efficient.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
Okay.

**Yusef** (1:42)
Yeah.

**Jonny** (1:43)
I know what he's gonna say. I kind of agree with him, but I think the effort should be put into being more effective before the effort is put into being efficient. I think it's possible to be very efficient at doing bad things. Like, I think if you're being effective and you take ages, it's still better than being efficient and doing nothing.

**Chris Williamson** (2:19)
Right, so, life hacks number two.
Number two, you're waving around, you're waving. I don't know, just making peace sign. Peace, listeners, peace. Okay, so, I'm gonna open up. On the last episode, I mentioned that I will be talking about SleepCycle, and that is gonna be my first one today. So SleepCycle is an app that you use for tracking sleep. You set an alarm last thing at night, and it presumes that that is the final thing that you do. So it calls that your sleep, you're going to bed time. It then tracks when you wake up on a morning, sets an alarm off. You can give it a window of time between an hour and 10 minutes, during which it uses the motion sensor in your phone to detect your motion sensor or the microphone to detect the depth of sleep that you're in, and it tries to find the time to wake you when you're closest to light sleep. That feature for me, I don't use an awful lot, but I know it can be pretty effective. The thing that I like the most is just tracking the amount of time that I've been asleep. I've used it for 1,200 plus nights now, so I've been doing it since 2008

**Yusef** (3:27)
Big data collection there.

**Chris Williamson** (3:28)
Yeah.

**Yusef** (3:29)
So your correlates will be very accurate now as well.

**Chris Williamson** (3:33)
It's unbelievable. Are you still using it?

**Yusef** (3:35)
Not frequently.

**Chris Williamson** (3:36)
Right, okay.

**Yusef** (3:37)
Should explain what the correlates are I suppose as well.

**Chris Williamson** (3:39)
Yeah, so the amount of data that it tracks to do with your sleep is unbelievable. So it associates the weather, the air temperature, the pressure, the moon's position, the location, the geographic location that you're in based on your phone's location services. It literally uses everything and then plots it against how good was your sleep. So it uses the length of time that you're asleep plus the depth of sleep determined by either the microphone or the motion sensor, and then works out a quality of sleep that's based on a percentage. That percentage then gets plotted against all the other bits and pieces, and then it shows you an average of your time over the last week, over month, over all time, and it also tells you people in your country, what their average is, so on and so forth. So if you're a bit of a person who likes to drill down the data on that sort of thing, you can really get into it. Even if you don't, it tells you how long you've been asleep and what the effects on your sleep are. So I know that when it's a non-full moon, whatever the opposite is, like non-existent moon, what is it?