My Smart Watch Experiment

For years I was tracking my walking with an app on my phone. It wasn’t super-accurate, partly because I couldn’t “wear” it. It’s an android phone and too big for a pocket. Plus, a lot of my clothes don’t have pockets.

But I was making do. I really didn’t want to get into the Fitbit thing. I can become obsessive about keeping track of things and that seemed to be asking for trouble.

However, after my hospital visits, I realized looking back, that my energy had been leaking away very slowly for months and I needed a way to see if I was making progress.

I never knew how many steps I was taking when I was at home. I keep the house phone and the smart phone in a small tote bag that I carry around with me, but not always. If I’m relocating items from one room to another in an effort to get rid of cutter, I leave the tote in a central spot.

All this to say that I now own a smart watch. I’m working on making friends with it.

My first problem was that the directions, and there are a lot of them, were too tiny for me to read. I enlarged them on the printer so I could read them. But then I couldn’t understand them, and I don’t think the printer can fix that. I handed it all to my husband.

The next problem was that it’s big. I rarely wear a watch around the house and this one is big enough that I haven’t been able to forget I have it on.

On the other hand, as I suspected, I do put in a fair number of steps around the house. I just went from the kitchen where I put on the watch, to my bedroom to deliver clutter, to the computer and it was almost 100 steps. I  do that a lot. When I add in all the times I walk into a room and can’t remember why until I go back to what I was doing and figure it out, then go back for it—it adds up.

The watch has more functions than I can keep track of, but I can tell time and count steps with it and that’s all I want right now.

I was hoping that it would make me feel smarter, but it hasn’t so far.

Maybe I just need to give it a little more time.