Always on the Move with the Apple Watch

The one great feature all smartwatches have in common is the ability to receive notifications right on your wrist without having to pull out your phone from your pocket. I have gotten so used to this by now that I don’t even reflect on how I am being perceived by other people when taking a peek at my Apple Watch from time to time.

Something funny happened to me at work today that made me more conscious about the pitfalls of being an early adopter. I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine and happened to receive a couple of Slack messages at the same time, so naturally I kept glancing at my watch. By the fourth or fifth notification my co-worker apologized for holding me up for what she perceived to be a meeting I was getting late to. Since I had repeatedly been looking at my watch she just assumed that I was looking at the time. Needless to say I had to explain myself and we were having a good laugh about it.

The comic misunderstanding got me thinking about how we have gotten so used to people peeking at their phones during conversations that we don’t even get offended for not having their full attention. With the widespread adoption of smartwatches we will eventually learn that people who keep looking at the time are simply the next evolutionary step in our society’s continuous partial attention behavior and that we just can’t help it.

Another co-worker told me the Apple Watch made him less prone to act on those distractions because when he used to get them on the iPhone he had easier access to the keyboard; with the watch it was a more cumbersome transition from reading to answering. While I agree with him that smartwatches have made notifications more convenient for their users, they certainly haven’t contributed to us being less distracted. Then again, maybe that is one thing we shouldn't expect technology to solve for us.