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More water please

At work I always enjoy chatting with our lead designer, who is also a strongman, and competes in strongman competitions. In addition to talking about design, I love to pick his brain about how to become more healthy and fit, and he is very generous with his advice and the lessons learned during his training. One day I noticed that he is filling a huge one gallon bottle of water, and I could not resist to ask why.

He explained that he needs to drink more than a gallon of water everyday, and that without measuring how much water he consumed, at the end of the day he's not sure if he hit his goal or not. I was intrigued, and decided to see how much water I drank everyday, even though I had no intention of matching his consumption.

I bought a 1 liter bottle of water, and set to drink 3 liters of water a day, as the Mayo Clinic recommends. To my surprise I discovered that I am no where near the recommended quantity, even after factoring in the incidental drinks I consume everyday--coffee and soda.

It was an eye opener for me, and as the management adage says: "you can't manage what you don't measure", you can't improve what you don't measure. Armed with a simple and easy tool to see the amount of water I drink everyday, it became a game to improve on it, and you could not beat the simple feedback.

There is something to be said about simple tools.
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