Before you choose to leave your gym, check if it’s really a chore.
Digital Media Management is a collaborative magazine run by students of Hyper Island’s Digital Media Management course. This month we’re working on Business Transformation, taking ailing companies and industries and rebuilding them with digital technology and innovative business models.
I was on the train back from London on Sunday evening and overheard a conversation between a Scottish lady and a man who didn’t seem in the least bit interested.
She was talking, at great length and considerable speed, about her recent experiences at a local gym. She had been visiting the last few months, and had been taking trials of various classes and structured, organised ways of working out — different cycles of exercises with weights, different alternations of timing (20 seconds of HIIT, 20 of LIIT), different trainers, different schools of aggressive role-modelling (“I loved the Navy Fitness class but Army Fitness was horrible”).
Eventually she decided she quite liked spinning, which is cycling without going anywhere. She liked it because she could do it at her own pace, without anyone barking instructions at her.
Which to an extent is fair enough.
To another extent I think she’s rather missing the point.
I think (I can’t say for sure) that what this girl wanted was to look good, lose weight, get fit, all that noise. That requires doing something that she might not enjoy for a bit for a worthwhile outcome.
In the real world we call this a chore.
Chores are all those little things we all have to do but don’t particularly enjoy doing. This might be vacuuming, working out, commuting to work, paying for groceries, or changing your babies nappies, reading ‘good’ books, watching ‘important’ films.
Recently more and more we have become very attached to the idea that everything we do should be totally frictionless, that the things that used to be chores should be actually enjoyable.
We see this quite a lot in lifestyle products — diets that let you eat what you want or tell you delicious new recipes that will fix your digestive tract; running shoes that fit perfectly and release a lovely lavender smell when you run properly; superfoods that have all the Vitamin E you need for a decade and taste like chocolate muffins.
I wonder how much this is affecting the way we see the world.
Key to a lot of the work we’re doing in this module is human-centred design — exactly this process of finding problems actual humans are having and addressing them in order to smooth out the unpleasantness in people’s lives (and make a little bit of money from doing so). One of the things we do is look for pain points — sections of an experience where enjoyment falls below an acceptable standard (or at least below the average for the experience).
An example of this might be that when you go to the gym to work out, you don’t enjoy the free weights, even though they’re really good for weight loss and strength building.
Our solution to that might be a workout that doesn’t involve free weights, even though they’re an excellent answer to your original problem.
I wonder if sometimes this constant longing for enjoyment from chores is making us lose sight of the point of them — if we never find anything we enjoy at the gym, or don’t find a healthy food we enjoy eating, we might stop going to the gym and eating healthily, and get very unfit and have attendant health problems, even though the point of the act originally had nothing to do with enjoying the act itself.
