One Month Without an Apple Watch
The Apple Watch (for me at least) occupies that special category that many of Apple’s products have: I go from an initial reaction of “why would anyone want this?”, through curiosity, all the way to “omg I can’t live without this”.
I’ve now owned an Apple Watch for at least the past 5 years, and hadn’t gone a day without wearing it in all that time, up until a month ago (to the day).
During the past month I’ve (as expected) missed having it around, but it’s also given me the opportunity to reflect how it has affected my behaviours in certain ways for better and for worse.
Let’s start with the most obvious use case– telling the time. Prior to first owning an Apple Watch, I wasn’t much of a watch person, it seemed wildly ostentatious to dedicate space on your body for the rather menial task of knowing the exact time, when it was relatively easy to get that information elsewhere. However, I’ve found that this is something I’ve really come to take for granted. Whether for work or running errands, it feels like I constantly need to know what time it is, and in many cases I’ll be in a situation where I can’t conveniently find out, such as being on the move, or otherwise being unable to pull out my phone (I will say that Alexa has helped tremendously in this regard). It’s such a simple thing and yet I do miss it (although not quite to the point where I’m prepared to get a dumb watch).
Then there was the other big surprise for me. Before I owned the watch, I wondered what the point of a device that doesn’t really do anything a smartphone can do already. But what I’ve discovered over time is that I stopped carrying my phone around with me. I realised this once I had to start doing it again, and what a drag that is, especially after becoming accustomed to how notifications happen.
Without the watch there’s a small but uncomfortable delay between getting a notification (assuming you notice it coming through), and then getting that little dopamine hit from it, which is caused by having to pick up your phone, orient it, wait for it to unlock (and oh my, I had no idea how annoying it is that often you need to dismiss the notifications feed in order to actually unlock the phone, then swipe down again just to see what the notification was in the first place*).
*(Yes, I’m aware there’s an option to show notifications even with the phone locked, but now I’m used to that extra layer of security.)
Ok, but here’s the real meat of the story. We need to talk about Fitness. The reason I ultimately decided I wanted to get an Apple Watch was for its fitness capabilities. That simple thing of tracking your heart rate throughout the day and deriving actually useful metrics about yourself as a result was killer. How much exercise did I do? How does that compare to previously? Ok, but what does that actually translate into in terms of calories burned? Can you walk the walk as well as talk the talk?
5 years of Apple watch has undeniably raised my physical fitness. All the graphs moved in a positive direction. I’m fortunate to not be overweight (despite basically eating whatever). I rarely get ill compared to when I was younger (which seems absurd, but there you are). I consider so much of this down to the sheer amount of nagging the Apple Watch does in so many empowering and infuriating ways.
It starts with the rings, of course. There are three: stand, exercise, and move. The aim is to try and “close” all three, every day. Each gives you a different goal, and each shows your forward progress towards them. For “stand”, you have to be on your feet for, basically 12 minutes a day (technically one minute per hour, but if you’re looking to game it, you can). For me this was the “award for turning up”. It seems trivial (assuming your watch is fully charged) to achieve this during a normal day without really trying. If you’re lagging, the watch will nag you at precisely ten minutes before the hour to get up.
The exercise ring is somewhat more challenging, and I would say that it’s probably been the most habit-forming prompt in terms of trying to stay active every day. You have to do 30 minutes of exercise (I recently discovered that you can actually change this target, which I might do in the future) during the day. Crucially though, the watch itself decides what counts as exercise. Sure, you can tell it you’re doing an indoor run and then go take a nap, and you’ll make zero progress towards the goal as a result. When I first got the watch it seemed like 30 minutes every day was some kind of pipe dream, but now I’ve can reliably accomplish double that just from walking the dog.
The final one, move, is the one I find the most problematic. It counts “active calories”, the idea being the more intense the workout, the more active calories you’ll burn. The goal is personalised and regularly updated (every Monday morning you’ll get a summary and a revised target based on the past week’s performance). If you did a lot of exercise one week, the goal next week will be increased, if you didn’t, it might be decreased.
What I’ve come to realise though, is that all of this straddles the line between encouragement (“you can do more!”) and disappointment (“you’re not doing enough!”). You’ll be nudged to hit the goals every day, and celebrated when you do. But just as this can be motivating, the lack of it can be similarly demotivating. There are monthly challenges, which are things like (burn 25,000 calories this month), and which seem to be tuned towards making you do more and more each month. After 5 years, I feel like I’ve figured out what a reasonable target is for me to accomplish overall, but also that that target is not sustainable on a daily basis. Some days I just need to rest, or do stuff that isn’t working out.
Having my watch prompt me to basically do a 10k run every day isn’t a great feeling. I have stuff I need to do. It actually started to make me feel stressed, that I wasn’t doing enough. Maybe if I integrate my running into my daily routine, maybe I can do some pushups during zoom calls. But after 5 years, I’ve realised it won’t stop. I can imagine that there is a scenario where someone is prompted to do 25 hours of exercise per day.
To be clear, I recognise that given the tradeoff between not stressing people out that are doing their best, vs raising the overall fitness level of the population, it’s the right choice. I can (and have) disable the prompts when they get to be too much. But so much of what the watch does, intentionally and otherwise, is about domoredomoredomore.
Case in point, the social features. If you have a friend who also has an Apple Watch, you can share your activity with them. Meaning, you see, in real-time, each others’ rings, and you’ll be notified whenever they complete a workout or hit some target. This is nice from a motivational perspective, and there are features on the watch for responding to these notification with some message (and really the most compelling thing about these for me is seeing the stock messages that Apple’s apparently out of touch content designers come up with, such as “G.O.A.T 🐐” or “Fire. 🔥” when someone goes for a walk, but otherwise only seem to clog up iMessage feeds), but at a certain point, waking up in the morning to be told that Dave just completed a 2 hour HIIT session doesn’t make me feel motivated, it makes me feel like everything is some sort of competition, which I am losing because I had the nerve to go to sleep.
After a month without this stuff, I don’t feel like I’m doing appreciably less exercise. I think I have a good sense now of which workouts yield which results without having to know the exact numbers. I know that I need to have space and time to work out, not a notification while I’m busy doing something else. And I‘ve discovered that it’s perfectly fine to stop in the middle of a walk for a few minutes without having my watch ask me if I’m done working out and then feeling uneasy about it. I’m grateful to having achieved this place where regular exercise is such a part of my routine, that I can appreciate the results in terms of health. But I’m also really glad to have a break from the nagging, even if just for a little while.