My guilty pleasure is Quora, which I dip into if a question intrigues me. Sometimes I “archive” the more interesting topics here.
“How should I set my Apple fitness move goal?“
By the “should” I am going to assume this means “what is a good goal” rather than the mechanics of setting goals.
Apple Watch offers a bunch of different dimensions for goal setting – including active calories and time standing – so the first thing to do is explore what goals can be set and decide which are meaningful to you.
Then it’s time to decide what level of goal to set. There are two main philosophies here: set a goal that stretches you a little, and set a goal you know you can hit. Your approach depends on your personality and how you expect the watch to help you. Another dimension is whether you are using the watch as a tool to help increase your overall activity or more as a way to manage it.
Identifying a move goal requires a combination of practicality and unflinching honesty. If I need goals that make me stretch – ie, that in the grand scheme can be easy to miss (say, because I came down with a cold, I had to tend to an urgent problem, or major weather made it unsafe to get to a facility with specific equipment) – but I also need to see that closed circle/green check mark, then I need to find a satisfying way to account for those stretch goals while not frustrating myself regularly with missed “gold stars”. If I am starting from low activity and wanting to work up, then the level of these goals – or maybe even which goals I set – will change, and I also need a plan for that.
Apple Watch has defaults based on demographics, so one way would be to accept those defaults and then see how you feel when you meet/miss them. (I believe these goals will nudge up if you meet them consistently – a way to account for increasing your activity level over time, although you and the algorithm might have different ideas about the velocity of those changes!) You should also explore the other metrics that are not goal based and see if there’s something highly reinforcing for you; this could be something trend-oriented (ie, not right for a daily goal) and meaningful enough to you that you will check it regularly and act on it.
TL;DR – factors in choosing and setting goals
There are a lot of questions that go into the goals an individual should set. Do you expect those goals to change over time? How responsive are you to nudges in general, and to indicators of success or failure in particular? Do you need reinforcement for a lot of different behaviors, or do you have one “lynchpin” behavior that causes other desired behaviors to fall into line? If you are looking to make changes in several behaviors, what is the priority? Or do you need to try prioritizing different behaviors to see if one of them can help guide the others? What is your daily schedule like? Are you looking to move more on a daily basis, or are you more interested in weekly trends? What are the features on your device, and which of those interest you enough to pay attention to them?
The number one thing to keep in mind with a new fitness tracker is that it will take time to understand how it will best help you. Give yourself that time, and permission to change course while you figure out the right direction.