2022-11-20 Why I finally bought an Apple Watch

My first thoughts on release of Apple Watch gen 1

"It seems a bit excessive."

"I can type faster on my phone."

"The battery life is short to the point I would need to charge mid-day if I were working." (In 2015 I was just starting university.)

"I should just wear one actual analog watch that only tells the time."

Some years pass by

So I eventually learn that the Apple Watch battery life is improving. Great, that takes care of one problem.

Apparently the functions are not too excessive. They're more like extensions/complements to the iPhone - some tasks can be done faster and without the need to pick up the phone from the pocket. Try doing this as fast as you can - it will take 3-4 seconds just to struggle with the phone in your pocket. The watch though? 1 second to move your arm up closer to your face.

Voice recognition and speech-to-text comes to the Apple Watch. Hmm, so maybe there's a way to quickly reply to messages. Dictating is much faster. I should know, I can dictate my medical notes (thank goodness).

The math I ended up doing

Pickups

I think this is one of the bigger selling points for me. I want to "triage" my notifications. I don't want to have to pick up my phone for every notification I get. Imagine there are 100 notifications per day or so. I just checked my phone today, and it seems my daily average pickups range in the past month is 106-140 pickups per day. That's around 300 seconds wasted per day just picking up the phone. 5 minutes per day, 365 days per year, around 1800 minutes, or 60 hours per year just picking up phones. Just let that sink in a bit...

Just cutting that pickup time from 3-4 seconds to 1-2 seconds, or approximately 50% -> that's only 30 hours per year I have to waste picking up the phone, i.e. 30 hours per year saved

Notifications and replying

After being able to triage notifications, I get to pick and choose which ones to really reply to.
e.g. E-mails. Unless it's truly urgent, I won't be replying to these anytime quickly.
For some messages from friends, I can dictate to reply if really wanted to.
I estimate that dictating even w some error correction takes 50% as much time, given to use the phone, I would have to unlock it, open the app, etc.

Out of perhaps 100 pickups per day, maybe only 20 of them are worth replying to on the spot.
If each one takes around 20 seconds on the phone, 10 seconds on the watch, the time saving is as follows:

(20 pickups * 20 seconds / pickupphone) - (20 pickups * 10 seconds / pickupphone) = 200 seconds, or 3.33 minutes per day
For a year, that is around 1200minutes / year, or 20 hours per year saved

Pickups + Notifications and replying

So far, 30 hours + 20 hours = 50 hours per year saved. Just on proper triage of notifications and time reduced to reply. Great!

Other reasons I bought the Apple Watch

Sleep tracking

I used to manually enter in when I went to bed, and when I got out of bed. I would also have to "guess" when exactly I fell asleep. To do this, I would usually add 30 minutes to the time I went to bed. Of course, I would not have remembered that, so I had to write all of this in a note.
I open the note 1 time to record time in bed, 1 time to record the time out of bed, and "n" times to record time I fall asleep. "n" being the number of times I end up not falling asleep / waking up again. This all takes time. Each instance recording takes around 20 seconds (with opening the phone, opening the app to record the times).
So per day, that is at the least 1 minute. Or to make it easy, per year, 365 minutes ~ 6 hours.

So with the Apple Watch, as long as I use the Sleep / bedtime function, all of this is AUTOMATIC and much more accurate as sleep cycles are tracked.

Other health functions

Heart rate tracking is quite valuable to me. I like to know if my resting heart rate is actually on the lower end of normal, so I know I'm not so unfit.

Blood O2, well, I don't anticipate using this much, and I honestly have not. When I actually become hypoxemic, there will be a strong reason why, and by that point, I will probably end up in a hospital anyway.

ECG, ah this one is fun. I know I'm not having some arrhythmia or acute coronary syndrome.

More math again

### Pickups + Notifications and replying + Sleep tracking

30 hours + 20 hours + 6 hours = 56 hours per year saved

While it seems unfair to put the time savings per year, it does let me put that in perspective.
For example, 56 hours, in anime episode perspective... each episode being around 1/3 hour, so 56 / (1/3) being 168 episodes worth of anime. For a 12 episode anime, that's 14 anime seasons right there; I probably watch around that many animes in 1-2 years. So...at least there's something I can do with my time instead of wasting time just picking up the phone or recording sleep hours.

Realistically though, this is time that I can spend learning new things or researching something important, e.g. filling in spreadsheets, what to invest in now, finding out the next new milk tea / coffee shop to go to.

In conclusion

I wanted to save time, so I bought an Apple Watch.
Analog watch on my right wrist, Apple Watch on my left wrist.
Yep, I'm pretty weird.