The most useful things I’ve learned from my month of Apple Watch ownership:¹

1. I keep the watch in Theater Mode all the time. The screen only turns on when I specifically press a button. A battery charge lasts longer.
2. Slapping the face of the watch with my palm turns off the screen and silences alerts. Which is terribly satisfying.
3. The watch face named “Infograph” offers the most complications. (sheesh, can’t we just call them widgets, or doodads?)
4. An elegant hack for cramming more complications onto the watch face:
   • make a copy of the Infograph face by following these steps, then
   • swipe between faces with this trick.
5. This guy’s tips are pretty good.

1. Yah, I caved and finally bought me a smartwatch. For a guy who works in tech, I have some Luddite tendencies–I generally only pick up a new technology when I see a clear use case for it.
   
   I’d been ruminating buying one for awhile (I was particularly jazzed about the concept of an e-ink smartwatch).
   
   But at the end of the day, my concrete use case was a device that (a) worked like a phone when I took it running (out of Bluetooth range of my iPhone), and (b) wasn’t gigantic on my ladylike wrist. Add those up and it meant I was going for a cellular model of the latest, smallest Apple Watch, the 41mm Series 9.
   
   The watch’s purpose is to protect me from the phone, which is kind of breathtaking when I think about it: I purchased device #2 to protect me from device #1. But don’t take my word for it–it’s related in this entertaining Wired article from 2015:
   
   Along the way, the Apple team landed upon the Watch’s raison d’être. It came down to this: Your phone is ruining your life. ↩︎