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How Apple Watch Alarms and Timers Save My Butt
My “prospective memory” is terrible. Technology is the only answer
I own an Apple watch, but the truth is, I don’t use it for much. True, I monitor my health stats while cycling, and sometimes dictate quick text-message replies. But that’s probably only one-quarter of the times I use it.
The other 75% of uses?
It’s in setting alarms to remind myself to do things.
I am constantly lifting my wrist up to my mouth, Dick-Tracy-style, then summoning Siri and telling it to “set an alarm for 2:30 pm with the label [DO THIS PARTICULAR THING]”. Or I’ll set a timer to go off with a label, in, say, ten minutes. Just today, for example, I used alarms to remind myself to get ready ten minutes before a Zoom call was to start; to ding 15 minutes after I put a piece of salmon to cook in the oven; to remind myself to call my insurance company just after lunch; about a dozen more.
Why, precisely, am I so addicted to this usage? It’s because of a simple fact about human cognition — which is that we all tend to have really terrible “prospective memory”.
