This little piece of tech changed my life
I received an Apple Watch for my birthday.
“Woop de doo,” I hear you say.
“People get Apple Watches all the time. What’s the big deal?”
Well, the big deal is that it has changed my life.
No, I’m not a born-again Apple disciple.
I don’t camp out the front of the Apple Store for days when a new product is launching.
I’m not a crazed Apple fan who will stop at nothing to procure a new device. That makes me think of Arnie in Jingle All The Way and now I’m laughing.
Anyway, the point is this little piece of tech that now sits on my wrist has changed me.
And there is a very simple reason why.
Attention.
Prior to my Apple Watch life, my phone was the way I accessed the bulk of those things that we all need:
The time, the date, banking, messages, phone calls, music, podcasts, maps, photos.
But because my phone also had these:
Social media, YouTube, News, Business Apps, Analytics, Slack, Real Estate, Airbnb…
Well, I know you understand what I’m going to say next.
I would pick up my phone purely because I wanted to know what time it was, and all of a sudden I was on Instagram answering DM’s and “just checking” my work emails.
If I was ever “waiting” for something my default action would be to check my phone.
But since this little watch has come into my life, all that has changed.
My energy has shifted from distracted, to attentive.
I don’t bring my phone anywhere unless it’s a bigger business trip. Everything I actually need is on my wrist.
The rest I can access within work hours when I’m at my desk.
And I feel like me again.
Transcript:
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[00:00:00] Brianna: I got an Apple Watch for my birthday. And it has changed my life. No, I'm not some sort of Apple fanatic. I'm not a crazed Apple fan that will camp outside, waiting for the new Apple product to be launched. I'm not gonna stampede the doors and push past people like you see Arnie do on Jingle All The Way.
[00:00:25] One of my favorite movies of all time. That's just not me. I like Apple products, but I don't obsess about those things. I recently sent an email out to my newsletter subscribers, telling them the story of this Apple watch. And I got such a good response from it that I'm going to share it with you here as well.
[00:00:43] I have now had this Apple watch for about four months prior to my Apple watch life. I got everything I needed from my phone, as most of us do. We can tell the time, the date, podcasts, music, checking with people via messages, phone calls, all the standard stuff. You've got your calendar, events, organization, banking, that sort of thing.
[00:01:08] The normal stuff that you can access from your phone. But the problem I had was that because my phone also had social media, YouTube, business accounts. analytics, Airbnb, Uber Eats, all the other stuff. It meant that the distraction level was high. When I go to check the time, I bring up my phone and I check the time, but then all of a sudden I'm on social media, I'm checking my Instagram DMs, I'm checking my business emails.
[00:01:36] Things that I never intended to be doing in that moment. I just wanted to know what the time was. And then all of a sudden I'm lost somewhere and I can't remember what I even went to my phone for in the first place. This is stuff that I on reflection realize I've been doing, but I didn't really realize it at the time before I had the Apple watch.
[00:01:57] So how did the Apple watch change my life? Well, I went from distraction to attention, and that's massive. Everything shifted from me picking up my phone and by accident being on something that I didn't mean to be, to having my Apple Watch come up with the time right there, checking it. And then that's it.
[00:02:19] Social media, you can't really access on the Apple Watch. I can access things that I really want, like my music and podcasts, being a podcast producer, SMSing, phone calls. I can still do those things on my Apple Watch, but there is literally no distractions. And because I also walk many kilometers a day, I can now track those steps.
[00:02:42] It's just made such a profound impact on my mental health that I feel like everyone needs to know this. We spend way too much time on these short form content platforms that suck us in because of an algorithm. And then we lose all this time. We waste so much time on things that really don't matter.
[00:03:06] What do you do with the information that you gain from that TikTok video that was like a funny viral thing? What do you do with that information? You have it now. You could tell someone about it later, but does it add any value to your life? Actually, these are the questions that I started thinking about myself.
[00:03:25] Once I got away from the distraction of having a phone around with all those distractions on it, I started to really think about who I am, what I love doing. And there was so much more peace, so much more peace and quiet. I'd pick up a book, or I wouldn't pick up a book. If I'm out now, and I'm meeting someone for lunch, I'd never bring my phone because everything I have is on my watch.
[00:03:52] And instead of the default going to go to distraction, to not be socially awkward by looking, I've stopped that. I go back to what I used to do, which was people watch. And that's how a lot of my songwriting happened because I would be sitting somewhere and watching people go by and imagining what their lives are like and imagining where they're going and what they're doing and who they're talking to.
[00:04:17] If they're on the. Phone. Have they just got good news? Bad news. I'm so interested by people. And for the longest time, I haven't been really engaging in society when I'm out there in the world with other people. So that's my reflection. That's all I really wanted to say, is that the Apple Watch has changed my life, is that I'm no longer distracted.
[00:04:44] I'm so much more attentive. I feel so much better. I'm walking more, even more than I was before, because I want to impress my Apple Watch. Because I want those rings to get all the way around. It's such a good feeling to feel like I'm more in my body. I'm more myself than I have been in quite a long time.
[00:05:05] And I would implore you to check your screen time on your phone and you decide for yourself whether that is acceptable. Whatever number that comes up, is that acceptable? How much time do you spend on devices that you really don't need to be spending on? And you will realize once you're off of that, there is so much more space for you to think, create.
[00:05:30] And you'll do some of your best work because of it as well. Are you on social media as a job? That's something that can be hard to get out of as well. Maybe you love short form content, but for me personally, I have felt a massive pull towards long form, long conversations and feeling way more connected.
[00:05:50] to the content that I'm consuming. That's why I started this YouTube channel. I really wanted a way to connect with long form in an audio format and a video format as well. Okay, talk to you later.
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