On Time

I was gifted a Fitbit Smartwatch for Christmas, mostly as a tool for marathon training. I have no complaints with the little bit of tech. It's got great battery life, tracks steps and time, and is mostly reliable at buzzing my wrists with notifications from my phone, email, slack and other linked apps.

During the longer runs, the run tracker was great at displaying my current pace, and afterwards the analysis of splits and heart-rate was fascinating, even if it didn't significantly alter my training regime (https://www.halhigdon.com/training-programs/marathon-training/novice-1-marathon/). Even more fascinating was the sleep tracking, which split sleep into three types (deep, light, and REM) and crunched the numbers of the total number of hours per night. I've been tracking my sleep for six months now, and I can count the number of nights I've gotten 8+ hours one one hand. That culprit is probably the fact that I'm both a night owl and have 4 young kids and a dog in the house with me. And I'd probably be within a margin of error if I calculated my sleep time as AlarmTime - BedTime +- 30min. But I wouldn't have the fancy charts and graphs without the fancy 200$ smartwatch!

Moreso, wearing a watch every day has been a shift in other ways. The accelerometer in the watch itself is triggered by various movements, specifically lifting and rotating my left wrist to glance at the watch face. This is mostly consistent, but sometimes the sensors don't trigger and I'm left looking at a black square. I could press the buttons on the side of course, but I usually just repeat the gesture, this time with exaggerated movements, lifting my entire arm till its parallel to ground, good prim posture like an Englishman verifying his train is on time.

I've also shifted to an analog watch face. Originally I wanted something information rich, with a full timestamp date, down to the second, along with the weather forecast, heart-rate and fitness stats. But I'd glance at my watch, pick out one piece of erroneous data (current heart-rate feels high, or the weather is delayed), and forget to even check the time.

So now it's an analog face with Day/Date and fitness stats in the corner. The UX of an analog clock really hasn't been topped: the current time can be grokked at a glance, and even better, the amount of time until something. Digital watch displays require the user to do a tiny bit of mental math adding or subtracting numbers. Analog displays chunk sets of time into slices of pie that are added and consumed. Do I have enough time to do X? Quarter till the hour - plenty of time.

From there I'm not sure how the mental journey went. Perhaps it was remembering this wonderful essay by Gary Shteyngart on mechanical watches (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of-a-watch-geek). Or the beautifully shot youtube videos dissecting luxury timepieces on Watchfinder & Co (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLaoR2K7Dsa_KUK-DVpdZZA). Mechanical watches are my new guilty pleasure, filling up my Amazon wishlist. Most of my gmail ads are now for watches I'll never be able to afford (Pateks and Omegas), simply because I've been googling around.

Shteyngart explores it better than I'll ever be able to describe, but there's something about being so in-tune with time you affix a device to your body. In the past, I lived with the mindset that I lived on my own time. I had the privilege to mostly be free of responsibilities, aside from my own whims. Deadlines at work were set in the scope of weeks. My calendar was free of social commitments. There was something punk rock about ditching the watch. It was a shackle of The Man.

I'm older now, decidedly not punk rock, even if I do blare a few Spotify playlists of NOFX from time to time. There's nothing wrong with tracking time, living efficiently by the clock, having that tool conveniently buckled to my wrist.

And now as my calendar resembles a Tetris board in late game, a watch that buzzes when calendar invites pop-up is pretty convenient, along with the fitness tracking and the rest of it.

But perhaps my fascination with mechanical watches is the fact the movement can run for years (instead of days), and exists outside the realm of silicon chips. I like the idea of a tool that would continue to function if our current digital age crashed down around us and we were left scavenging the wasteland for a meager existence. Or simply go backpacking for a few days.

This past weekend, my watch battery was drained, so I plugged it in, then went outside to view the sunset through the trees. The early evening was cool, the sun low through the new summer leaves, my entire backyard and porch bathed in golden hour light. Squirrels chittered and scrambled through the trees. Songbirds  warbled.

For once, there was nothing to do but sit. Time went untracked, and it was good.

Then I went in and put on my watch.