Last Friday I woke up from a power nap and the first thought that pooped into my mind was, “It’s time to get an Apple Watch.”

I thought about this several times before, especially since I started exercising with Co-Pilot. Over several notes in the journal and Emacs, I convinced myself not to opt for the Apple Watch mostly because of my love-hate relationship with privacy. After all, buying a GPS-tracker-personal-information-sharing-device for your wrist from a company with most of its infrastructure invested in China is not exactly a good pro-privacy argument.

But in the last couple of years, as I slowly started opening up about my lifestyle (here and elsewhere), I stopped giving shit. Privacy at this date and age is impossible, at least with current technologies. In the meantime, what an Apple watch can offer is very appealing.

For one, it puts my exercise routine on another level. It’s one thing to exercise with the iPhone and watch the screen; it’s another to have a watch telling you to slow down or speed up or have it pause and continue sets without me needing to clumsily try to touch the screen while holding a weight is excellent. Then there’s running, which I plan to get back to more seriously again, and I want to track my progress.

The other thing I hope the watch will assist me within the well-being department is meditation. I meditate whenever I finish my exercises, but I need to go longer and deeper. I might consider something like Headspace (if anyone reading this has opinions, please share!), but for now, I’m still getting adjusted. Meanwhile, I appreciate being reminded to meditate (Breath in Apple Health) daily on top of the one at the end of my exercise.

Then there are my sleeping issues, and I want to keep track of those. While it’s pretty easy to know how well I slept (do I feel like a zombie or not?), having a long-term insight into this with all the information the watch provides would be helpful.

Outside of the health department, there are many more implications, like taking notes and reminders consistently, knowing when someone important messages me, the ease of taking the subway and paying without taking out a wallet (especially during the winter), and even taking selfies from a distance with the phone is a plus.

There’s the magic-wow factor (I can’t get over the pinching to open menus on the watch, or just raising it to ask Siri something, and it’s all right there), but that will probably fade away.

It will take the watch a few more days before I get all the data I want to see and a few more days for me to get adjusted anyway. In the meantime, please let me know if you have any useful tricks/routines you use your Apple Watch for or even useful Shortcuts!

An apple watch during its setup stage, with a white charging cable at the side