Why I Threw Away My Apple Watch
A few years back, I bought myself a new Apple Watch. I wanted to be more mindful of my health and fitness. I hoped it will help with productivity. Instead, it added another layer of responsibility, one more thing I had to take care of.
The watch was useful: it tracked my daily steps, and sleeping patterns. I didn’t have to take out my phone to check out a notification. But it had one huge problem: the battery life. It only lasted for two days.
Being a forgetful person, as I am, I often forgot to charge the damn thing, and in the morning discovered that it had drained out. I still wore the watch, a watch that didn’t work. When I finally remembered to charge it, I couldn’t find the charging cord. And when, a week later, I found the cord, I couldn’t find the watch anymore.
The same pattern kept happening: I used the watch for a few days, forgot to charge it, walked with a dead watch on my hand, and when I found the charger, I had lost the watch. I gave up.
The watch produced more problems than solutions. I buy this new shiny toy, hoping it will help me in everyday life. And it does… for a while–creating new difficulties at the same time. It’s a rule of thumb: Fixing one issue always produces a new one.
The same thing happened when I bought a robot vacuum cleaner. Wouldn’t it be good if a robot always kept our floors clean, I thought.
Well, the robot was wonderful. We gathered with a whole family on a couch to observe it work. Look, it’s going under the table — Oh, my god, it will get stuck there! — Why is it so stupid, it can’t fit through the legs of the chair — It’s not stupid, it’s like a small child, it needs to learn first. So we sat there, commenting, rooting for the new member of our family.
The honeymoon period ran out and problems (there’s always problems) started to come out. Before our robot could start his work, I had to clean the floors. Having a kid at home, the task wasn’t always an easy one: there were Lego bricks, pieces of paper, pencils: all potential hazards for a small and simple-minded robot vacuum cleaner who could easily choke on these things.
I gave up on the robot. As much as I tried to help it, sweeping the floors, putting the chairs on the tables, removing all potential roadblocks, it still managed to get stuck somehow.
I threw away my Apple Watch and bought a simple and reliable CASIO. (I bought three of them, actually). Casio watch doesn’t ask me of anything. It just works. The battery lasts for 10 years, and it has three functions: showing time, alarm, and a stopwatch.
Look, how beautiful it is. What else do you need?
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Some projects I’m working on at the moment:
- Publish a public domain book on KDP. I’m in the process of transcribing it at the moment.
- Finish a short book: Practical Notetaking for Writers.
- Maybe even create a email-based course: Practical Zettelkasten. Not sure, yet.
- Finish Center, Enter, Turn book (this will take at least 6 more books)