Why I Grudgingly Love My Apple Watch

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll go through all of the reasons I love my Apple Watch. 

My husband and I both get a big Christmas present from his parents each year which we are instructed to choose, wrap, and put under the tree.  Two years ago, we both got Apple Watches.  To be honest, I didn’t think I was going to like mine. I thought all of the buzzing alerts on my arm would make me crazier than I already am.  At best, I thought it would be kind of superfluous since i already had a phone. Turns out, I was wrong.

Just a quick note — i got my watch a couple of years ago, so it is the old style that requires my phone to be with me for internet access.  Okay — let me walk you through the features I use regularly and love. 

Screen - You have a bunch of options for the watch face. Some are quite beautiful.  Not surprisingly, I chose function over form.  This modular style gives me 6 modules to access right from the face of the watch.  You can customize the color and modules by pressing this customize button. I like this garish multi-color option since it makes differentiating between modules a little easier. Within the customization, you can use the watch dial to scroll through the options for each module. Here are the ones I use:

• Weather - I use this multiple times a day. I know it seems crazy to check my watch for the temperature outside when I could just walk out the door. But generally I check this when I’m standing in my closet trying to figure out what to wear. It’s even more important on the days I go running, since I run with a friend from the Northeast and I have yet to find weather unpleasant enough to deter her.  It is extremely helpful to know whether it is 15 degrees or 45 outside. 
• Time and Date - it is a Watch, so these features are sort of obvious, but I didn’t realize how much I prefer looking at my wrist for the time rather than having to pull out my phone. 
• Timer - I use the timer maybe more than any other feature. And yes, other, less expensive watches also have timers, but it is SO EASY TO USE.  My ADHD brain makes me crazy forgetful, so my life runs on timers. I used to use the one on my stove, but this is so much better — it’s quieter for everyone else in the house, but just as urgent for me. I use this timer whenever I do a load of laundry, have to remember to leave the house at a certain time, or give my kids a time-out or a task timeframe.  It has a bunch of preset times that you can use button-style, or it’s also easy to customize a time with the side dial. 
• Exercise activities - I mentioned that I run several times a week. I am not a fanatic. I’m not trying to get any faster or qualify for an event. I just do it because it’s good for me and I socialize with my running friends at the same time.  That said, I like knowing some basic stats about my run. It’s easy to quickly start the exercise event and afterwards it’ll give me some basic info such as duration, distance, calories burned, pace, and average heart rate.  Then once I save the event, it uploads it to my iPhone where I can see workout history and splits.  It’s not as accurate as a Garmin, but it is fine for my needs. 
• Activity rings - I kind of love/hate these activity rings.  There are 3.  The green one tracks how many minutes you have been active today (the goal is 30m). The red one tracks how many calories you have burned against your daily goal.  And the blue one tracks whether you are standing enough.  The watch wants you to stand at least a little for 12 hours a day. And just standing up doesn’t quite do it.  I have yet to totally figure it out, but walking briskly around for a minute or 2 seems to do it. This one will yell at you — okay, remind you — that you need to stand up if you have gotten 50m into an hour without enough movement. You can turn this off if you aren’t big on Big Brother telling you what to do. I kind of like the reminder to move around since I have some sedentary tendencies. My husband, who was born with ants in his pants, NEVER gets a reminder to stand. 

Alerts

Okay — those were just the things I use from the watch’s home screen. Let’s talk about <<alerts>>, since that was something I thought would really bother me. I’m a distractable person and it took me a while to figure out the right combination of alerts for me on my phone.  With this watch actually attached to my body, I thought I’d be an attention slave to every ping or buzz. What I discovered is that the watch alerts are extensively customizable.  The default is the loud PING, which I turned off immediately in the watch settings here. Now, any alert just give a haptic buzz, which is noticeable to me, but to no one else. Most of the customizing in this area has to be done in the iPhone app that controls the phone. Here it is.  If I go into Sounds and Haptics, you’ll see I’ve adjusted the haptic strength (that is a fancy word for a buzz that you can feel) to high and turned on Prominent Haptic. Then, within the Notifications screen, you can go through each watch app and determine how you want to be notified. In most cases, you can choose to mirror the choices you have already made on your phone or customize them.  Let’s go through a couple of the decisions I made:

Emails - I choose to get no alerts here. I would go crazy if I got an alert for every email that hit my inbox. I have this turned off on my phone also. 

Texts - i do get notifications for texts. I get a haptic vibration and a visual alert. Here’s what that looks like on my watch.  I actually like this so much more than i thought i would.  My kids tend to text me, so if I’m out to coffee, i can keep my phone in my purse and still know immediately if there is an emergency.  People react way differently to you checking your watch vs. you checking your phone.  Plus, it’s much harder to get distracted by other stuff if you are just checking your watch quickly. Also, I can be at a party and not have to carry my phone around if my kids are home by themselves.  It’s great. You can respond back with an emoji or boilerplate text (you can customize these options into your own frequent responses) or use the handwriting feature.  I definitely have used this in a pinch.  It definitely forces you to be concise. Here’s me writing “Fine”. 

Phone - you can take calls on your watch. I love this also. The sound quality isn’t great and holding your arm up to speak is tiring, but I CAN answer my phone on my watch from upstairs in my house and then run down and take the rest of the call from my phone.

News - I like getting news alerts on my watch.  That way when I’m head down doing some project all day, I’ll at least have some warning if the world is about to blow up. 

Reminders - these buzz to remind me on my watch. So, if I’ve set a reminder, alarm, or timer on my phone, I get alerts on my phone. Not only is this helpful, but it’s also much easier to turn off than having to fish for my phone or run downstairs to turn it off. 

There is one other thing I use frequently on my watch and that is the controls for music, audiobooks, or podcasts. Whenever you are playing something on your phone, you get a watch screen that allows you to pause or play or, my personal favorite, rewind by 30 seconds. 

So, it turns out that I like my watch so much, I only take it off to charge at night.  In fact, I recently bought a fancy band so that it doesn’t look super out of place when I’m more dressed up. Not that that ever really dissuaded me from wearing it!  

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!