Having a time piece on my wrist was never a priority for me. I needed my wrists free to be able to play, climb and throw rocks into the sea. Who cared what time of the day it was. When it was dinner time, mum usually called from the balcony. 🙂

History

My first one was a Mickey Mouse dial with cute hands, a childs’ watch, that I found on an evening stroll by the shipyard in Rijeka.

I have no idea where I lost it or left it.

Next, I got a gift from my uncle, 30 years ago, a Casio watch with a calculator, complete with the keypad! O joy! I dreamt about it before I even knew how it looked like. It looked like something from the future, I kid you not.

If I remember correctly, I wore it until it was so worn out it failed and stopped working. It was a sad day.

Next, my father brought me a Citizen Kinetic watch. Go google it, but you will not find it on the list. It was a simpler version. Remember, this was roughly 25-30 years ago. White background, thin red numbers, little dots glowing in the dark, steel housing, it showed the day of month and didn’t need any batteries or winding! Also, it did not have a standard one-second-tick but it ticked 5 times per second. Instead of a boring tick………tick………tick it went ts.ts.ts.ts.ts.ts.ts.ts.ts.ts.ts.ts. It was the best “white-noise generator” when I wanted to sleep! I still have it, in my “memories vault” on a shelf and it still works.

I used a single wrist watch for the past couple of years. It was a Suunto Yachtsman, my preferred watch that I used mostly in connection with my sailing involvement. It’s massive but it fits my somewhat big hands perfectly.

It doesn’t shine the same way as it did as new. I lost it in the sea in Spain but the recuperated it. It got cought in many a sails and ropes, shrouds scratched it but it persists. After 12 years it is still my companion on every sailing regatta, not letting me down.

But as most of my time I spend typing away on a keyboard, any watch starts bothering me. And there’s no way I can sleep with one tied around my wrist. Basically, I don’t need a watch anymore. My phone tells me the time. And more than ever, it seems I forgot my watch at home more often that I did forget the phone.

So, what now?

A couple of years a go my first kid was born and his sleep was really ligh. What I did was I disabled any sound-producing device in the house. I taped the microwave beeper, cut the wires to the door bell, disabled the interphone, put my phone on “mute” and enabled the vibration.

I always treated my phone as my luxury to call other people, not the other way around, so I did not mind the calls I missed. But sometimes they were important and I forgot to switch the ringer back on once I was outside.

Phone vibration were louder than the ringer if you put the phone on the wooden table or on the nightstand. Yuck! Vibrations off!

The answer. For me, at least.

A smartwatch. Why? As an extension to my tests and calls notifications. And nothing more.

Apple watch? P-leeeeease! Something simple, that I might eventually tinker with. An android wearable? Hell no.

Pebble. I held it in my hands roughly a year ago. Tested the vibrations and was happy. Not too aggressive and enough strong for me to be aware of them. Just in time to support them on Kickstarter with the PebbleTime watch.

Got it a couple months later and I wear it since, practically every day. I did not find a watchface I liked right away, so I programmed my own.

Slowly slowly I disabled all the notifications except those for calls and texts. I keep my phone in my pocket or in my bag lately. It does wonders for your etiquette. 🙂

One more realization, NOT ONE notification is really that important to interrupt you when you’re doing something you love.

In a couple of words: nothing fancy, charges once a week, relays everything important in total silence. Beat this!

And, of course, it also tells the time.