The Challenge

A few weeks ago, I started a challenge to use my phone for less than 10 minutes a day. But, I still need to do practical things digitally without getting distracted by unnecessary stuff. That's where the Apple Watch comes in handy.

Setting Up Watch Faces

On my Apple Watch, I use three modular watch faces. This design allows for the most complications and includes a digital clock. Each watch face serves a different purpose:

1. Daily Use

This is the watch face I use the most through out the day.

• Activities

• Reminders

• Voice memos: for recording notes for blog posts (like this one) or Q&A articles.

• Stocard: for my Zoo pass and other fidelity cards

2. Learning

This is my second most used watch face that is all focused on learning stuff.

• Apple Books: for listening to audio books

• Snipd: for listening to podcasts, I'm not totally satisfied with it as I still have to first open a podcast on my phone so that it shows up on the watch.

• Petey: for asking chatGPT questions

• Apple music: not using it anymore at the moment, just didn't remove it yet.

3. Health

This is a setup that I'm not using much at the moment as there are habits that I have to rebuild around mindfulness, running and calories tracking.

• Sleep

• Activities

• Running

• Mindfulness

• Calory

I've arranged them so that the daily use face is in the middle, making it easy to swipe left or right to switch modes.

Activating the swipe between watch faces

To make it fast to go from one "mode" to the other, I've enabled the Swiping between faces in the Apple Watch settings. This feature used to be default but has changed in Watch OS 10.

Avoiding Dynamic Widgets

The latest watchOS includes dynamic widgets accessible with the scroll wheel. But, I've found these harder to interact with, especially when walking. Using the more fixed watch faces makes tapping more precise and less frustrating.

It's gonna change

This setup is still evolving as part of my one-year challenge. I'm sure things will change a lot, but that's where I am today.

For example here a few things I'm interested to fix:

• Better podcast app: I'm looking for a podcast app that works on the Apple Watch without needing to use an iPhone.

• Better voice memo app: Sometimes I have to stop a recording to speak with someone. There is no way to add something to a recording, I need to create a new one. So I'm looking for an app where I can "append" some additional audio voice note to an existing voice note.

Made with AI help
This article was is based on an audio note I recorded while walking which was transcribed and rewritten by the app Audiopen. I then reviewed it manually :)