My smart watch keeps me up at night.

TRACK EVERYTHING

I am making the assumption that my neutral time is focused on productive activities. There might be bias in this interpretation.

Using RescueTime, I attempted to track my media diet and general digital activities. I was excited that I could download the application to my laptop, desktop, browsers (firefox/chrome), and even my android phone.

I reviewed my patterns after 7 days and was pleasantly surprised to see I appeared to be fairly productive – given that I am clearly expert at managing my attention… or so I thought.

LOCATE CURIOUSITY

The chart that stood out most to me was the one indicating my most used app was for SMS. It turns out that I consume most of my media through conversation.

Perhaps, the assumed productivity was just a capture of idle screens while I busily texted with friends about a range of topics.

TWILIGHT HOUR

Just as I was dozing off after 7 days of capturing data, I felt a buzzing on my wrist. I looked down to see a tweet from EthanZ on twitter and a message from a friend.

None of the tracking applications I downloaded could document the notifications I consumed on my smart watch!

In fact, I had recently discovered I could text from my watch by speaking directly to it and even send emoticons by just drawing them. Productivity has been tanking ever since this discovery. This explained my seemingly constant use of SMS which is tracked by my phone even when I do it through my smart watch.

LESSON LEARNED

This weeklong exploration revealed the difficulty of tracking activities even when being very intentional. I am glad I have clear evidence for why I should turn off my watch when I need to focus. My observations reveal that Rolf Dobelli was right is speaking to the time wasting side of news (to which I add social media). Productivity increases as media decreases, but I spend most of my time on media.