New Feature Alert: Action Plans!

What we're building next at Realize Me

Hello! This is Danielle, VP of Technology & Operations at Realize Me. I’m writing today about a new feature that we’ve been developing, with some background on how we’ve been thinking about it, how it works, and where we hope to see it go. We’d love to continue making posts about our roadmap, so if you’re interested in that type of content, make sure to subscribe!

At Realize Me, we've been (and continue to be) focused on what you can do with your health and fitness data when it's collected in one place. Part of that meant bridging the gaps in your data that would otherwise require more apps; we built native tracking to allow you to track your supplements, fasting times, qualitative metrics, hydration, and more. As our Beta program has gone on, we've come to a conclusion: being able to track your data is great, but it needs to be super easy. We decided to spend more time and concerted effort coming up with a solution that would work for busy people who are focused on their health. 

With that, we're delighted to announce a feature that we’re building under the (working) name Action Plans. Everything that we aim to do can be boiled down to an action. We try to drink enough water, exercise a certain amount, get more vegetables in our diet; you get the drift. Whether it is already part of your regimen, or it’s something new you’re trying out for the sake of an experiment, it belongs to a collective body of actions that represent your approach to health and well-being; hence, the name Action Plans.

Each of us has an action plan; some might be more rigorous than others, some might stick to their plan better than others, but there is a collection of things that we aim to do on a regular or semi-regular basis.

An additional highlight of the name is that the body of actions is representative of what we are interested in learning from each other when it comes to health and performance—when we hear a piece of illuminating advice from someone, we don't assume that is the one thing that they have knowledge on—we are interested to learn how they approach other things as well, because the collective body of actions is what shapes us in the end. 

How it Works

With each action that becomes part of your Action Plan, a target will be set. These targets encompass a variety of different ways people may be tracking; for example, targeting a specific number (work out 3 times a week), a directional goal (get enough vegetables in), or a simple yes or no (measure blood pressure).

These targets also feed into reports that give you a look back at how you’re doing. They will include a sense of not just how you’re doing toward your targets, but how you’re doing with logging at all—if you’ve tried manually tracking before, you know that recording the data in the first place is often where we fall down, and one of the reasons people shy away from logging is because they know they didn’t do well. we believe that you manage what you track, and tracking even when you’re not proud of the results deserves credit too.

Of course, given our focus on data integration as well, there are actions that are tied to metrics from various data sources, and can automatically mark themselves as complete; for example, if you have an action item to run once a week, and you track that run on your Garmin, we will automatically detect that run without you having to log it.

Where We See This Going

In addition to this feature being useful to our users in their day to day tracking, our bet is that it also opens the door to community. People have long depended on each other to hold themselves accountable; from exercising regularly to sticking with a chosen diet, the external commitment to others that we are going to do what we said we would is a very powerful tool. Much more on this later!

If this sounds interesting to you, please join our waitlist!