A few weeks ago I changed my Apple Watch face. That’s rare for me. With the exception of sometimes switching to the Peanuts watch face in the evenings to entertain my youngest son, I’ve had my watch parked on Metropolitan ever since I bought it.

A few weeks ago I switched to this one:

It’s the Solar Analog face, with just two complications:

Top middle: Date
Bottom middle: HIVE price

When active, the background immediately after the second hand switches to a brighter color that will trail after it. It’s nothing jaw-dropping, but is a neat enough effect. When inactive, it switches to a dark background with golden lines.

[The last few versions of the Apple Watch have had an always-on display, but it goes “inactive” most of the time, which means it doesn’t have as much on-screen activity to help conserve battery.]

I decided to give it a try because I wanted to use a full screen watch face (as opposed to a circle clock in the middle of the screen) and I wanted one that looked relatively good when inactive, as that will be the way I see it most of the time.

And that… is that. I do wish for better watch faces. There are some apps that will allow you to run a much wider selection of watch faces, but with them you are basically always running their app, so there are battery issues as well as some others.

Of course I understand Apple’s position. If they opened up the API and allowed third-party watch faces, they would be flooded with faces that used so much power as to kill the battery in hours. And Apple would be the ones getting the hate for that. Of course they already get hate for not allowing it at all. So it’s kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t position.[1]

Oh well. At least for the moment, I’ll be sporting this one.

Why do I wear an Apple Watch anyway?

The aesthetics don’t quite match my usual taste. I tend to prefer analogue tools, especially when it comes to things like note-taking or timekeeping. I’ll reach for a fountain pen and a paper planner over any task app.
And, yes, I do feel a small thrill when I wind an old wristwatch. The tactile nature of analog cannot be overstated. But the Apple Watch keeps winning its spot on my wrist. Here’s why.

Health tracking

The stereotype is people being obsessed with “closing their rings”. Honestly, I couldn’t care less about that. An open or closed ring doesn’t bother me in the least. I can be OCD in some things of my life, but this is not one of them.

That said, I am getting older. And though I don’t have any health problems at the moment (knock on wood), being able to passively keep watch doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Making sure my heart rate doesn’t do anything weird as well as other checks.

And yeah, the rings. Again I don’t worry about them too much, but I do have it set to give me a nudge if I’ve been sitting down too long or if I haven’t moved enough.

Haptic alarm

This feature alone is almost worth the price. Seriously — this is the best alarm clock I’ve ever owned.

Most mornings, my watch wakes me up with a gentle tap on the wrist. No buzzing phone, no jarring chime, no radio song, no Sonny & Cher waking me up for the nth time on Groundhog day or other. Just a rhythmic pulse — like someone politely poking you awake from a dream.

It’s a lifesaver when you don’t want to wake the whole house, or when your own brain is already waking up and just needs a subtle nudge. I would have killed for this when both my kids were younger. Regardless of how far away from them I slept, my alarm would always wake them (Japanese houses are small) and I would be dealing with a screaming baby as I tried to quickly get ready for work.

Best alarm clock I’ve ever owned. No question.

Silent timers and nudges

A surprising number of daily routines are now dictated by silent haptics. I use them to:

Tea timer
Set a timebox for a focused work session
Cut off a rambling lesson before it eats up the whole class (seriously, I have my entire lesson divided into sections and my watch silently tells me when I’m getting near the end of any section)

I could use a kitchen timer, yes. But then I’d need to hear it. Everyone nearby would need to hear it. The Apple Watch just taps me, like a ghost taskmaster.

Micro-boundaries

Wearing the watch helps me draw small boundaries in my day.

For example, I keep my phone on silent and away from my workspace when I’m writing. But I can still glance at my wrist for urgent notifications — or just ignore them if I see they’re not. That alone reduces my phone pickups drastically.

It also helps me avoid the “check one thing, accidentally lose 20 minutes on Reddit” spiral. No scrolling! Speaking of which…

Smallest-possible screen

Despite its temptations, the Apple Watch is still too small to scroll Reddit or check email in any serious way. That’s a feature, not a bug. It gives me the utility of a screen without the cost of screen addiction. It’s hard to doomscroll on something the size of a cracker.

I don’t think the Apple Watch is perfect. The sleep tracking is still only okay, and sometimes it miscounts my stand hours if I stand too long without sitting. And there is the lack of good watch faces, mentioned above.

But despite all that, it’s earned its place. Not because it does more — but because it lets me think about less.

Then again, some Android watch faces have this problem, but as far as I know, Android doesn’t receive any blame or hate for it. But maybe people just expect this more “Wild West” approach in that ecosystem? ↩

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