I forgot my watch

I know, it doesn’t sound like much but boy was it distracting yesterday. It was the first time in two and a half years that I’d forgotten to wear my Apple Watch. I looked at my bare wrist countless times over the course of the day. It was a nice reminder of how much I use it.

Since Tammy and I bought our original watches (Series 0, now on the kids’ wrists), neither of us have gone a day without them. We’ve gotten nicer bands for dressing them up for special occasions, but any other fancy watches we owned have been relegated to the drawer. I was trying to explain to Davor at work just how discombobulated I was and summed it up this way: I look at my wrist for four major reasons:

1. Time and Date. Duh. I’ve always worn a watch. A lot of people I know stopped wearing watches when they started carrying phones with the time on them, but I never did.
2. Weather, in particular the temperature. In a place like Calgary where the weather is so variable, having the temperature at a glance really is useful. It was -29 when I went to work yesterday, and +6 today.
3. Notifications. I get electronic messages all day, every day. Yesterday reminded me of how much better it is to get notified of them by a tap on the wrist (and seen at a glance) than an annoying buzz in my pants pocket.
4. Activity tracking. Over the years, I’ve changed a lot of fitness habits, but there always is the trap of my office chair and a lot of sit-down hobbies. The multicolored activity rings on my watch face are a reminder to get up and move around and if I forget, there’s a tap on my wrist every hour.

There are many other things as well, but these are the killer apps for the Apple Watch for me, in that order.

And I remembered my watch today. ⌚