Over the weekend I wrote about my Smart Watch Dependency, and how I was frustrated that I can't easily take time off from using it because of how much I rely on it to receive notifications.

Well, I thought that maybe this would be a good time to evaluate my smart watch usage. Similar to how I lost sight of calorie tracking to the point that I gave up on it, I have lost sight of what I'm tracking with my smart watch.

Here's what my watch currently tracks:

• Steps
• Heart rate & heart rate variance (for measuring stress¹)
• Sleep
• Exercises

Some of its other functions:

• Alarms
• Timer & chronometer
• Calendar
• Control music on my phone
• Notifications from phone
• Weather
• Probably other things I don't even use

That's a wide range of functionality when you actually break it down! I am pretty sure I used to use a lot of these more often than I do now. I was trying to think of an analogy or metaphor to represent how my usage has changed but it's probably simpler to just say that the watch has lost meaning for me.

I want to reclaim that meaning as part of my efforts to get back to mindfully tracking my calories to lose weight again. I'm not 100% sure how to go about doing this but I think my best bet is to keep a log of the things that are important to me to track. Samsung Health provides all sorts of charts and graphs so I don't need to waste my time setting up spreadsheets for that; but I wouldn't mind putting together some text somewhere (either publicly, or even in a text file for myself) to keep tabs on what's going on.

What I think is important that I can track with my watch:

• Sleep
• Daily steps*
• Daily exercise**

*A note on steps: I don't subscribe to the "get 10,000 steps a day" idea, because I've learned long ago that this number has no real meaning and is completely arbitrary; all you need is set a number you want to reach each day and aim for that. My current daily goal is 8,000 and I keep putting off looking at my step averages to reset my goal.

**A note on exercise tracking: I used to use calories burned from exercises tracked by my watch to give myself more calories to eat, but I've turned that off in Cronometer. It's actually bad to eat back your burned calories because our devices usually overestimate how many calories we truly burn. What I want to track here is simply what I'm doing and for how long, to get a general measure of my activity.

If nothing else this will at least give me satisfaction that I'm using the watch to its capabilities instead of an expensive notification machine that also displays the time.

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1. The accuracy of this function is likely dubious, but I like the idea that I can keep an eye on stress levels as that's important for me to keep seizures at bay.↩