It wasn’t something that I planned to do. In fact the problem was I didn’t plan as much as I should have before a shoot, and I left my house in a scattered flurry. Arriving at the studio after an hour on the 405, I checked my phone to see an assault of tweets, G+ messages, Youtube comments, emails, and a new survey for the Google Opinion Rewards app.
Why hadn’t my amazing wearable data device alerted me to all of this digital activity? Because I had carelessly left it on its charging dock at home.
It was an opportunity to see if smartwatches really did provide a benefit beyond just being cool techy gadgety things. For the last couple months, between a Pebble, a Toq, a Martian, and a Gear 2, there really haven’t been any days where I haven’t been wearing something on my wrist. Like my favorite traditional timepieces, I often wondered if they were more of a fashion statement than actual productivity devices.
I took for granted how much they had influenced my behavior. They each do different things, have different features. Some have touchscreens, some track fitness, some can text, and one has a camera. However they all feed me At-A-Glance info on what’s happening with my notifications.
I don’t know when it happened exactly, but at some point during my smartwatch usage I simply turned off my phone’s notifications. I rely on my watch to notify me and filter what information is mission critical. It’s actually been quite liberating. Aside from my alarm clock my phone makes zero noise. No bleeps, no bloops, no ringtones. Even vibration is disabled, so when I set it down on a table I’m free of buzzy rumbles.
We’re an easily trained species. Smartphones are so ubiquitous that we’re now conditioned to respond to other people’s alerts. Since wearing a smartwatch, it’s been fascinating watching conversations. How in the middle of a chat, someone will halt if another’s phone makes a sound, pausing for a phone they don’t even own.
“Is that important? Do you need to get that?”
It’s such a subtle aspect of wearing a smartwatch, reducing that distraction. It’s far easier to engage with people directly in front of me, while still being aware of what’s happening digitally, and my digital awareness rarely comes at the expense of someone else’s attention.
For a whole day that awareness was gone. It was almost like I had lost a sense, or at least part of one, maybe like losing the sense of touch on my left foot’s pinky toe. Not disastrous, but noticeable and irritating.
I turned the volume back up on my phone. I pulled it out of my pocket for every little alert. It interrupted a lunch conversation for something completely inane. It slowed my day down, and it got in the way.
We’ll continue to incorporate data more and more into our daily lives, but the next tech revolution will need to focus on incorporating data in a more organic way. How do we get this information delivered closer to our natural senses without blocking our natural senses?
For as critical as I’ve been of smartwatches, and for as little as I’m impressed by packing smartphone-esque features on my wrist, the main functional mission of a watch remains. At-A-Glance delivery of small chunks of information has a subtle, nuanced, but profound affect on how I make it through my day.
After accidentally spending a cranky day without one, I probably wont be repeating this experiment any time soon…
Haven’t used a smart watch before. So when you get a call, you get a notification on your watch (vibration I’m assuming?) and then you pick up your (silent, motionless) phone if you need to answer? how does that work?
Often you can just push a button on the watch to answer the call from your phone. Handy if you’re using a bluetooth device, or you can just go directly to the phone as well.
*gasp* You checked your phone during lunch? Did you pick up the tab?
Thankfully I wasn’t playing a game of stacking LOL!