Hello Desk Dwellers!
If you're new here: welcome! Thank you so much for subscribing for updates on our progress in building this platform and community. It's been about a week since we sent our last update, and in case you missed that, we have put the contents of our last e-mail on our website. All other older emails can be seen there as well.
Today's message will be a summary of the feedback we received so far, and a link to an article we published that attempts to answer the question "what is health?".
Your feedback: a summary
A big thanks to all the people who took the time to write us feedback. It was very helpful and we appreciate your insights. Again, feedback is welcome at any point, but let's summarise the general vibe of the feedback we received so far.
The first question was: What are you looking for in Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers?
The most common answers can be summarised as: actionable tips, motivation, insightful resources, help with building routines.
Those things are very much part of our plan! A more evolved design of our website is going to be like a Wiki, with many actionable articles. The focus will very much be on "things you can try out", to nudge you towards action and experimentation. There will also be advice on the meta-layer: how do you figure out where to start? Writing these articles will be a ton of work, and which ones will be written first can be influenced by, you guessed it, your feedback. The "most wanted" topics will be covered first.
The next question was: Do you think a forum is a good tool for Healthy Living for Desk Dwellers? (If not, what would you suggest?)
This one yielded answers all over the place! Some people were very much against, some people wanted a forum. We will not go for something like Discord or Slack, that all moves too fast and generates too much FOMO.
We're currently leaning towards a more focused alternative for sharing comments and insights. Given that the website will be sort of Wiki based (so you peruse topics that are most interesting for you), maybe a good-enough option is that discussions will happen right underneath each article. This should scope the discussion (stay on topic!) and should be aimed at sharing your experience and tips for other members. Perhaps this is a nice middle ground between "not having a forum at all", and our wish for members to also weigh in on the topics at hand.
The last question was: Do you have other suggestions for us, based on the vision you've just read? Does your vision contrast from ours? If so, please explain!
We were glad to read that the idea of creating positive feedback loops resonated with many. Someone wanted to know why we are helping people, "what's the positive feedback loop for you?", and that is a very good question. It forced us to once again ponder the capitalist angle: do we want to try and make money from this? As long as we both earn money in IT, we don't need to. We honestly want to help people lead healthier lives, so all the knowledge shared will be free. If people want more, Maaike is available as a nutrition and strength training coach. It doesn't go deeper than that, currently. When we're making a positive difference in the lives of a few people, that already counts for a lot and will make us happy.
One person raised another interesting point, which was that we should provide a definition of what it means to be healthy. "Do you mean nutrition, exercise, free from pain and how far do you go?".
This is a nice little bridge to the topic du jour!
What is health?
Last time, you've read about the Pillars of Health model. The aim was to provide you with a way to make sense of your current health status.
But we skipped a kind of important question: what is health?
Seems like an easy question, but when you ponder it for a hot minute, it turns out to be multi-faceted. Brew yourself a nice cup of tea again, and read the article. Reflection exercise included.