Why I still wear a watch in 2021

There are times when the convenience of one of these can't be beat.

I did a little personal experiment where I didn't wear a watch at all for a few weeks.

When I wasn't wearing a wearing a watch, I did what most people do to get the time and used my phone.

That didn't work out well. Having to pick up a thing and press a button just to get the time was annoying. It became even more annoying when I was somewhere the phone couldn't go, like the kitchen. (I'm not about to take my phone where there's routinely boiling water and hot cooking oils in use.)

I then tried just using the existing clocks I have. There's a clock on the microwave, a clock on my computer desktop, a clock in the car, and so on. This was better, but only slightly. Whenever I wanted to know the time, if I wasn't sitting in front of my computer, I had to go looking for a clock. This got old fast, because I had to stop whatever I was doing and find a clock just to know what time it was.

Another annoyance I found was not having fast access to the date and weekday. With the exception of my computer, a little travel atomic clock I keep in the bathroom and of course the phone, none of the other clocks I have tell me date information.

Most of the time I can get along not having fast day/date info access, but I can tell you the one time where it is needed. Driving. Pulling out a phone to do anything while driving is just plain stupid and I won't do it. If I wanted to know day/date info while on the road, the only way to get that from a phone safely is when stopped either at a traffic light or when parked.

Obviously, I went back to wearing a watch. And it's typical that a cheap Casio digital is what you'll see on my wrist. Usually either the A168W, A700W or F91W.

Not wearing a watch for the time I did wasn't awful, but annoying. I didn't realize how much I actually used one until I stopped wearing it.

Published 2021 Feb 4