Pebble Watch: Reducing My Distractions

I’m sure I’m not the only one, but when my phone vibrates in my pocket, I have this insatiable urge to interrupt anything I’m doing, pull my phone out, and check my notifications. It’s pointless, rude, and just an awful habit.

This all stems from the “realtime web” we live in today. We use email expecting responses within a couple of hours, our phones are constantly connected to Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networks we use. Each and every service is trying to shove more information down our throats 24/7 and it’s hard to escape if you work online.

But that’s something the Pebble watch surprisingly helps with. While a bit distracting at times, I can comfortably glance at my watch when something new comes in and I’m not sitting there distracted by the thought that an important notification like a server outage just hit my phone. I know immediately and can put my mind at ease.

When it isn’t important, I don’t have to go through the motions of: halting what I’m doing, reaching into my pocket, swiping to unlock the screen, opening notifications bar, reading the useless excerpt of the message, clicking on the notification, reading the real message and then finding out it wasn’t important after all.

Reducing distractions and notifications is hard these days and it’s hard to separate the important from the unimportant. This lets me sift through them, find the watch face that fits me, and eventually start building things for it that benefit me personally.