Personal Software to Stay Healthy — Part 2
I train pretty consistently: runs, gym sessions, hikes when I can get to the mountains. And yet for years I had this nagging awareness that the eight or nine hours a day I was spending almost completely still at my desk were probably undoing a fair amount of the work. Sitting inflicts slow, invisible damage on circulation, posture, blood sugar regulation, focus.
I know the research well enough on this. Breaking up long periods of sitting matters independently from how much you exercise otherwise. But knowing that and actually doing something about it, consistently, are very different problems.
So at some point I stopped looking for an app that would solve this for me and built one myself.
Meet H:Move
The idea is simple. Every hour, on the hour, the app prompts me to take a five-minute active break. A "movement snack" is a short guided exercise you can do in front of your desk in work clothes, designed to address what prolonged sitting accumulates over a day. Calf raises, thoracic rotations, hip openers (or dead hangs in fancier offices). The movements are sourced from physiotherapists and the corner of Instagram that posts useful things.
The library of movements used as foundation a document I'd been keeping for years, saving movements I came across and wanted to remember. For the app, Claude organized them by difficulty; some are easy to do in an office in work clothes and others really need a work-from-home setup or a pull-up bar. The idea was to let me choose what fit my environment of the moment, although at the time of launch, I was working from home.
!H:Move app showing the world map and movement library
A global issue
The first thing you see when you open H:Move is a world map and a few movement ideas. I wanted the map there for a few reasons. As a visual, it's pretty cool. It's also a quiet reminder that prolonged sitting is a global problem, not a personal failing. And mostly, it carries the wish that eventually, people in different time zones and different offices would be doing their movement snack at the same time. The tagline is "5 Mins Hourly, Globally" because that was the vision I had: a shared invisible ritual. I find that idea genuinely motivating.
The dots on the map show who's moving right now, and I should be upfront about this: it's a mix of real and generated users. There's no intention to deceive anyone though. It was more of a personal preference. Using a platform where you appear to be the only person in the room is a lonely experience, and imagining that other people might be doing the same thing at the same time made it more motivating for me. It's a small design decision that made the tool feel less empty.
What actually happened
I used H:Move a lot for the first few weeks, and then less than I expected to. Today, what I use instead are the movements themselves.
The platform did its job in a way. I explored the tech and built a cool prototype with Lovable, and I internalized enough of a habit that the hourly prompt is no longer what reminds me to move. I get up, do a hip opener or a dead hang, sit back down. The library is still where I go when I want to add something new to the rotation, and I add movements to it regularly when I find something worth keeping.
Honestly, I think this is a perfectly fine outcome for personal software, maybe even the best one. A tool can do its job by becoming unnecessary. We don't expect a recipe to stay open in the browser forever once we've learned to make the dish.
!H:Move exercise card showing Standing Torso Twists
Software for yourself first
I've spent the last decade building fitness and health products for other people, and there's something noticeably different about building something for yourself first. You can skip the user research because you are the user. You know exactly what's missing. You're not trying to imagine the problem, you're living it.
H:Move and my fitness dashboard published on aka.me/fit started the same way: a gap in my own life that existing tools weren't filling. The dashboard surfaces data I've already generated. H:Move creates a context for generating better data to begin with, by actually moving more throughout the day. And this all feeds into the wearable on my wrist.
People have started calling this personal software: simple apps you build for your own life, starting from your own needs, that run on your own terms. The fact that they might be useful to other people is a bonus, not the starting premise.
Give it a try
If you spend most of your day in a chair and you know in the back of your mind that the sitting is costing you something, H:Move is worth a look.
You don't even need an account (even though it's baked in). Show up at any hour, follow a movement, leave. Pressure-free, guilt-free. If it helps you build something into your day that wasn't there before, even a rough version of it, that's exactly what it was built for.
hmove.live (works better on mobile)
Stay strong.
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This is Part 2 of the Personal Software to Stay Healthy series. Part 1 was about my public fitness dashboard at aka.me/fit.
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