Six months ago, I bought an Apple Watch. I had been doing some research for a talk I gave to a local economic development group in my hometown (“Technology, Craft, and Local Economies“) and had somewhat of a throwaway line about how we’ve gone from supercomputers that send people to the moon to computers that we wear. I did some Googling and came upon stories about Apple Watches saving lives. This expensive watch suddenly seemed a lot less inexpensive so I took the plunge somewhat half-heartedly since I’ve never been a watch person. The specific model I bought was the Apple Watch Edition GPS + Cellular, 42mm with Gray Ceramic Case (Series 3).
You can find deep reviews of the Apple Watch with a simple Google search so I’m just going to list some of the things I like most:
- The watch. This is really mundane but a watch is really useful for my coaching work. I go to the client wherever they are. Some rooms have a clock and some don’t. As I started coaching, it seemed awkward to check the time on my phone. I didn’t want to be the guy digging in my pocket to check the time while a CEO was in the middle of explaining a difficult issue. At the same time, I have to keep myself and the client on schedule, so a watch is unusually helpful for the work I’m doing. The alarm on the Apple Watch is unobtrusive and I can use it to buzz when we have 5-10 minutes left in our session to make sure I focus on wrapping up and closing any remaining loops without interrupting the flow.
- Heart monitoring. I mentioned the “Apple Watches saves lives” stories above that first caught my attention. A friend recently had a surprise diagnosis of Atrial Fibrillation (AFib or AF) after a trip to the emergency room with some unusual symptoms. He told me about the Apple Heart Study at Stanford. You install an app on your watch that looks for irregular heart rhythms and if you have one, the app will connect you to a doctor for further monitoring. I ran the app for weeks before getting an “all clear” from it. The Apple Watch can detect hypertension and sleep apnea. On a more mundane level, because your heart rate is being monitored whenever you wear the watch, you learn a lot about what makes your heart beat faster or slower. Jack Dorsey found, for example, that testifying in Congress raises one’s heart rate. In the initial period, I started to understand how mundane activities (taking stairs, running for the open subway door) affected my heart rate and how much cardiovascular exercise I was getting when I wasn’t officially “working out.”
- Activity mindset. The “close your rings” mentality baked into the watch is incredibly motivating. If your rings aren’t closed for the day, you get a friendly alert (example: “A 5-minute brisk walk will close your Move ring.”) Quite often, I’ll jump up and walk around the living room or maybe around the block. On days when you close the rings early, it feels great. Some mornings I close all but my “stand” ring by 9am and I feel like I am truly winning at life.
- Sleep tracking. Sleep tracking is an inexact science and there are lots of articles out there about why wearables aren’t completely accurate but in my experience they seem at least directionally accurate so you can see improvements even if the baseline isn’t exactly right. I’ve been using the Apple Watch to track sleep using AutoSleep. I wear the watch when I’m sleeping and it has helped me understand my sleep patterns better than I ever have. For a while, I would note anything unusual I did before going to bed and wake up to see how I had slept. For example, just one or two drinks in the hours before bed killed my deep sleep completely. Late dinners did the same thing. On the nights with no alcohol and a relatively early dinner, I got high quality sleep. I figured this out after a couple of months and I have never been more rested and aware of how specific behaviors affect sleep. I had always heard this but seeing it reflected in data from your own body is much stronger evidence.
- Consistent workout monitoring. I try to go to the gym regularly and tend to use the elliptical machine and stationary bike. As anyone who does this knows, the calorie and heart rate readings you get on these machines can vary widely. With the watch, I just go to the Workout app on the watch and choose the activity and the watch takes care of the rest (and with WatchOS 5, automatic workout detection kicks in and the watch just “knows” what you’re doing). I used to take a photo of the screen on the workout machine when I was done and enter the numbers into a spreadsheet for tracking but now I just let the Health app keep track of it for the most part (though I still regularly dump the data from the Health app into a comma-delimited file using the QS Access app)
- The ability to leave your phone at home. I have the version with cellular service built in so I can put my AirPods in my pocket, leave my phone at home, and run an errand without worrying about missing a call or a text.
- Waterproof. You can wear it when swimming (I wore it in the ocean this summer) and in the shower.
- Control volume on a Sonos from the shower. This seems almost silly but I LOVE this feature. I have a Sonos in the bathroom and I listen to music in the shower. Sometimes you just want to turn a song up and if your watch and the Sonos are on the same wifi network, you can do that by turning the knob (aka the “Digital Crown”) on the side of the watch.
When I bought the Apple Watch, I wasn’t sure I would like it. Six months later, I love it. I feel more informed about my day-to-day health and that has unquestionably made me healthier. I’m not sure how I lived without it.
