In 2016, the company I worked with gifted everyone a Fitbit as a way of thanking us for our work. I’d never had a fitness tracker before and I immediately fell in love with having my activity metrics easily available to me. As a team, we started weekly Step Challenges and the competition was fun and also fierce. I can still remember doing jumping jacks at 10pm to make sure I remained on top.

In the ten years since then, I’ve worn a fitness tracker daily. I had more Fitbit products, before switching to a Garmin, and then finally my Apple Watch.

The biggest perk of the Apple Watch was how seamlessly it paired with my phone – allowing me to get wrist notifications on the go, send text messages, and even answer phone calls without digging my phone out of my bag.

But those notifications, it turns out, were wearing me down in a way I hadn’t realized… until I took my watch off this past May.

______________

Immediately after my Cabot Trail Relay Race, I removed my Apple Watch, powered it off, and put it in my closet. The reason why was entirely (and I do mean entirely) vanity: I didn’t want a tan line on my wrist when we get married this August. After 10 years of almost daily wear, I felt pretty naked and it took weeks to break the habit of looking at my wrist.

(And I won’t even get into the issue I ran into without that ‘Find iPhone’ option when I put it down and forget where…)

But, about a week or two later, I realized life seemed a little quieter than it had.

I wasn’t feeling the sensation of every Instagram message, news update, email, text, or phone call.

I wasn’t constantly “on”.

I wasn’t being overstimulated by content I didn’t have the bandwidth to consume for all of my waking hours.

And it felt… free.

_______________

As a mom and a senior leader, there’s no point in pretending I’m not attached to my devices. At any given moment, I could get a call from school or daycare; a Partner, client, or colleague could have an urgent request that needs my attention. So, my phone goes just about everywhere I go. And that was exacerbated when I took my Apple Watch off. I couldn’t be notified of an incoming phone call (nor could I answer it) if my phone was in my office and I was down the hall in a meeting.

In early August, I decided to sit down with my phone and re-assess my notifications. And I turned almost all of them off.

No more Messenger notifications.

No more Instagram notifications.

No more push notifications from this app or the other.

My only notifications are the ones I need: daycare, Outlook work emails, texts (and even those are limited during the day to key contacts), and phone calls.

Life got even quieter.

But after a few months without my Apple Watch, I’ll confess… I missed it.

I love the convenience of it. I love tracking my workouts and being able to see the metrics in real-time.

I occasionally wish I’d spent the extra money to get the Apple Watch that has cellular so I could leave my phone behind entirely.

I love being able to add music and pair my headphones to my wrist and not need to bring my phone on runs.

And then, I splurged on a cute strap that’s work-appropriate and I put my Apple Watch back on.

Just with fewer notifications.

And, in the past two months, I’ve taken calls from my wrist and tracked a handful of workouts. But I haven’t felt the same level of overstimulation and “over-connectedness” I felt before. Maybe it’s because I took a break. Maybe it’s because I’m not bombarded by the notifications from wake to sleep.

________________

When the Watch went away, I could clearly see that I had been too connected that I had disconnected myself from the world around me. I wasn’t distracted by the constant buzz on my wrist that would, inevitably, break my focus in conversations or in work dozens of times throughout the day. It also showed me how reliant I (and so many of us) have become on technology. The break forced me to go back to some good, old habits:

• writing down my appointments for the day on a sticky note the night before I leave the office so I have visibility into my day without needing the constant notifications;
• setting better boundaries around when I am and am not available;
• unplugging intentionally from time to time.

Will I always wear the Watch? Who knows. But, for now, I’m pretty glad to have it back.