Walks that start themselves
Updated 4 September 2026: the rhythm described here has since been corrected. The finding says get up every twenty minutes; it never says for how long. Mosey now stands by for twenty minutes and walks you three to twenty, each walk its own length — fifty-two of them.
I bought a walking pad the way everyone does: with a plan. The plan was to walk while I worked. What actually happened is that the pad became a place to stack things.
The problem isn’t motivation. It’s that a walk has a start, and a start is a decision, and by the third meeting of the morning I have no decisions left. So I wrote a small Mac app that makes the decision for me. You press one button when the day begins. The pad eases up to two kilometres an hour, walks you for twenty-five minutes, eases down, and rests for twenty-five. Then it starts again. It keeps going for as long as you like.
That’s the whole idea. The name is Mosey, because the pace is a mosey, and because nobody has ever felt pressured by the word.
The walks have reasons
The first version played the same twenty-five minutes over and over, and it was fine, and I stopped using it in a week. A walk with no reason is a treadmill. So each walk in Mosey is a small piece of writing: where you are and why you’re out. The river at dusk after the laptop shuts. The long way from the station because the shortcut takes four minutes and that is exactly the problem with it. The call that’s too good for the couch.
Fifty of them now, five each for ten places, and every one of them choreographs the pad: the pace changes where the story changes, and the pad tilts where the story climbs.
The ring
The thing I’m proudest of is the instrument. A walk is drawn as one closed line, twenty-five minutes clockwise from twelve. Its radius is your pace; its thickness is the hill; it lights up as far as you’ve walked, and a small dot breathes where you are now. The line is painted like an ensō, ten bristles each on its own slow clock, so it never quite sits still.
It replaced a countdown, a speed readout, and a progress bar. It reads better than all three.
What’s next
Mosey is going to the Mac App Store, and the first version is free — all of it. If you have a walking pad that speaks Bluetooth FTMS and a Mac, it should just work. If you don’t have a pad, the app ships with a demo one, so you can see whether this is your kind of walking before you buy anything.
I’ll write here as it happens.