Morning Walk #38
How does the Apple Watch fits into my life, and which watch faces do I use
Hi. I’m Stepa Mitaki. I’m a product person and an entrepreneur. I’ve been working in 🏙 govtech for eight years and currently work at a UK-based 🏦 fintech startup Silverbird while building a new company in 👩🏼⚕️ health tech on the side.
Morning Walk is a personal weekly newsletter where I share some musings on tech, digital healthcare, working on startups, productivity, some nerdy stuff and an occasional share of reflections on the war and how it feels being Russian at this moment in history.
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⌚️ How does the Apple Watch fits into my life, and which watch faces do I use
What is Apple Watch for you, and why do you use it? Most of you would have a different answer to this one. Today I want to tell you about what Apple Watch is for me and why and how I use it every day.
What does Apple tell us about it?
Those of you who follow tech business analytics probably know that Apple struggled at the beginning to define what Apple Watch actually is. It was everything all at once, and it was a mess. They finally nailed it to three core areas around the third edition. If you look closely at their Apple Watch website, you could notice those three areas. What Apple Watch does:
Supports you to be in shape (fitness partner that fits on your wrist)
Monitors your health (Always looking out for you)
Helps you stay connected (It keeps you connected to the people and things you care about most)
It boils down to three simple words: fitness, health, and connectedness. Super easy to remember, and I’m sure most of the answers to my questions would be somewhere around those lines.
What Apple Watch is for me
For me, it's connectedness first and foremost. The main reason I bought Apple Watch for the first time back in 2017 and still wear it today is to get me off my phone. I used to pick up my iPhone obnoxiously often just to check on my notifications. Then I was being absorbed by this device. It was mechanical: pick up, glance, swipe up to unlock, swipe left and right, check messages, and ten minutes are gone. That was unhealthy.
Now, thanks to the Apple Watch, I don't have to pick up my iPhone to check if I have new messages or glance at some quick information. It's all on my wrist without this massive slot machine pulling you into it.
Now I tuck my iPhone into a drawer in another room or my backpack if I'm outside. I wouldn't say it changed my life, and I completely cured my phone addiction, but it's much better now. It works for me.
In addition, Apple Watch motivates me to be in shape, and I like how it monitors my health, but it's secondary for me.
Watch Faces I use
The watch faces, and its complications change from season to season. For instance, there is no need to track UV index in the winter. Still, it's an essential complication for me in the summer. In addition, I set up a custom watch face every time I'm traveling, and it's always different depending on the destination, season, and reason for traveling.
As of now, I have seven different watch faces I use throughout the week.
Solar Dial
This is my main one. It's on every weekday from 6am until the end of my workday around 6-7pm. I like this so much because it changes color based on the current solar state. It's blue at midday and fades into dark blue when the sun goes down. No single other watch face changes its color during the day.
Complications I have here: today's date, next meeting, UV index, temperature. On top are for my work day, and two at the bottom for when I occasionally go for short walks outside during the day.
This one is on from 10pm until 6am on weekdays.
California
This is just beautiful, but it supports only one complication. I turn this on from time to time during the workday when I don't have many meetings and can do some deep work for several hours.
We have a meetings-free Tuesdays policy at our company, so sometimes I turn this one for the whole Tuesday. Just to set my mind for deep work and relax about keeping track of time.
Breath
I experimented with a few minimalistic watch faces I stuck to this one. I set this one up once I finish my workday. This "switch" moment helps signal my brain that I'm not working anymore. By clicking on the breath circle, you can launch the Mindfulness app, but I'm not doing this as often as I'd like to.
Utility
The utility watch face is set up at 10pm to signal me it's time to wind down to sleep. Here I have the most vital information to prepare for the next day: sunrise time, my first calendar event, and my alarm time.
Activity Digital
This is for my workout time. Well, my only workouts are simply playing football (this football ⚽️, not this one 🏈). I set this manually when I go to practice to set the mood for training.
Meridian (white)
This is a weekend watch face. I don't want to focus too much on timekeeping and following my schedule to relax from this control. And on the weekend, my main priority is getting enough time outside, so I want to know UV index and temperature and be able to quickly launch a walking workout.
Meridian (black)
This sets on a weekend right after the sunrise. The black one just looks much better in the dark, and there is no point in showing UV index anymore. Oh, and the Workout switches to the Mindfulness app.
Automation
Most watch faces switch automatically on the schedule I set up with the Shortcuts app.
Do you close Activity Rings?
You might have noticed I don’t have Activity complications in any of my watch faces except for one. This is rather unusual. I used to try to close my rings every day, but kind of grew out of it. But I found another passion – Monthly Challenges. I set up Activity complications based on my current Monthly Challenge. In June, I need to do 28 workouts, so I don’t need to follow my activity rings. But otherwise, I’d want to keep tabs on them quite often.
Conclusion
I believe Apple Watch is the most inspiring tech product on the market right now. It might be not as groundbreaking as some other non-mainstream technologies in development right now. Still, it doesn’t have to.
Dustin Curtis put it quite nicely:
👨🏻💻 Other interests
My 40-liter backpack travel guide
This is as nerdy as it gets. Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum blockchain) shares how he approaches packing his travel backpack.
Just to give you a hint of what to expect:
if you choose N clothing items, with levels of warmness spread out across powers of two, then you can be comfortable in 2N different temperature ranges by binary-encoding the expected temperature in the clothing you wear.
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something
This is a comment from Hacker News from 2017 that went viral. The great metaphor of social equality and entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
IBM's asshole test
A fun short story about how IBM filtered out assholes joining their grad scheme back in the days.
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That’s it for today. Thanks for reading. Until next week 👋🏻
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