Return Of The Watch

Watches are gone or going the way of the dodo right? I mean actual watches that just tell time not watches that try and be supercomputers.  Everyone tells the time on their devices now so you don’t get a watch to do just that.  Right?

I don’t wear a watch.  I haven’t worn a watch since I was a child, I think my last watch memory was seeing 1979 click over to 1980 on my casio digital watch at new year’s eve (yes even as a child I knew how to party).  I stopped wearing watches as a child because I kept losing them.  As I got older I didn’t want a watch because I felt that paying too much attention to time was unhealthy and stressful.  I think I have a good internal clock and I can always tell when a kitchen alarm i’ve set is about to go off about 5 seconds before it does :-).  On top of that, working with computers taught me to stop wearing anything on my wrists - it slows me down, irritates me and I end up taking bracelets off and - yes - losing them.

So this is a long way of saying, today I bought a watch.  Not an expensive one.  Just a swatch but I finally decided a watch is what’s missing from my life. You see I get very little “down” time.  When I do get downtime I know I have a set window to relax before I have to get some more work done.  That means I have to keep picking up my phone to check the time.  When I pick up my phone to check the time, I see mail notifications or text messages or am reminded of 1000 other things I should be doing in that moment instead of just sitting and reading.

The devices that tell me the time are also now inextricably linked with “work” and therefore “stress”.  A watch is now the easiest and least stressful way to actually tell the time.  It’s an interesting full circle and I wonder if it’s just me.

2 thoughts on “Return Of The Watch

  1. It’s NOT just you! I actually started wearing a watch again so that I’m not always picking up my phone when I’m with my twins. I thought it was a bad example to set them that the phone has to always be in your hands and it makes them want to play with the phone when I’m not really all that excited for them to do so. It also lets me check the time when they waken me in the middle of the night without turning on the phone and seeing all the stuff waiting for me to pay attention to it.

  2. Same reason I prefer reading on a Kindle vs an iPad. Having a device that does just one thing very well without distractions is nice. Of course paperbacks work just as well.

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