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Get Organized: How a Smartwatch Can Keep You More Organized

When reminders are delivered to your wrist and you can speak a note into your watch, you have a better shot at staying on top of things than when you rely on your phone alone.

By Jill Duffy
March 21, 2016
Get Organized: Can a Smartwatch Make You More Organized?

The first time I wore a smartwatch, I realized I would never miss a phone call again. My phone doesn't ring often, so when it does, it means someone is trying to reach me urgently. Ordinarily, my phone lives in a handbag, where I often can't hear it ring or feel it vibrate. I always miss calls. The first time I wore a smart device, however—a Garmin Vivosmart, which supports push notifications from iPhone or Android—all that changed. Incoming calls were suddenly unmistakable and impossible to ignore. I was hooked. And always getting my calls isn't the only reason why.

Get Organized Since then, I've worn about a dozen smartwatches or other wearable devices that support push notifications from smartphones. To this day, I rely on vibration to let me know about incoming calls. But vibration alerts are only one benefit of smartwatches. There are others that help disorganized people stay on top of everything happening in their lives.

Vibration Alerts

For both smartwatches and fitness trackers that come with smart functionality, vibration is a game-changer. Whenever your smart device needs to tell you something, it vibrates. Every smart device I've seen uses vibration.

Garmin Vivosmart

Vibration on the skin is very difficult to ignore. Some devices come with a setting so you can adjust the strength of the vibration, letting you crank it up if it's not strong enough to get your attention.

As I mentioned, vibration helps make sure we don't miss notifications from our phones, such as incoming calls. But they're also a more discreet form of notification, affording you a little privacy. You can set your phone or even just certain apps to silent and still receive notifications via vibration.

Because vibration is often the mode by which smart devices get our attention, what if you cut out all the other bells and whistles that smartwatches have—color touchscreens, optical heart rate monitors, nine-point motion detectors, and so on—and just made a wearable that vibrates when a notification hits your phone? There actually is such a device, called Ditto by Simple Matters($66.99 at Amazon), and, at $29, it's not bad if you're on a tight budget or aren't committed to wearing a watch.

Glances

What do you see when you glance at your watch? When you have a smartwatch, you can see important information that you might otherwise forget, especially if you're disorganized. So customize your smartwatch to show you important information when you glance at it.

Pebble Watch($39.00 at Amazon) has the Glance app. Apple Watch($300.00 at eBay)has a feature called Glances. Many smartwatches offer something similar. They all let you see information that's important to you when you glance at the watch or give it a quick swipe.

Let's say you routinely forget to check the weather report and often get caught in the rain without an umbrella. You can add weather information to your glance view and be more likely to know the forecast. Another way disorganized people can get more organized is to review what's on their calendar at the beginning of the day, before a meeting sneaks up on them. Add your calendar—or at the very least a badge count of upcoming events—to the info you see at a glance. It could go a long way to helping you be better prepared.

Location-Based Reminders

Another important tip for disorganized and forgetful people on how to use their technology to help them become more organized is to use location-based reminders.

Normally, we set reminders by time; for example, "Notify me at 6:30 a.m. to wake up, or remind me 10 minutes before the meeting so I show up on time." Location-based reminders, sometimes called geolocation reminders, are triggered by place rather than time. They use your phone's GPS to know where you are and when you come and go from that place. For example, you can set a geolocation reminder to pick up the dry cleaning when you leave work. Or you can set a geolocation operation so that when you arrive at the gym, your workout routine appears on your smartwatch.

In most smartwatches, geolocation reminders aren't native to the watch itself. Rather, they work by way of your phone. You have to set the reminder on your phone, which relays it to your connected device. But just as with phone calls, it's easy to miss these reminders if your phone is out of sight and touch. Notifications are simply more apparent when they're on your wrist.

Speech-to-Text

Every smartwatch owner should be able to make a note of something important when the idea strikes. Many smartwatches, including the Apple Watch and smartwatches running Android Wear, support voice input. Unfortunately, other kinds of smart devices, such as fitness trackers with push notifications, don't typically have this capability.

In order to use speech-to-text on a smartwatch, you need an app that understands voice input. A few of them include Evernote, Todoist($5 Per Month at Todoist), Wunderlist, and Google Keep.

Enric Enrich is an iOS and Mac developer at Todoist, and the person responsible for Todoist's Apple Watch app. "What I like most," he said of the app, "is the quickness with which I can add tasks to Todoist just by using my voice. I love not having to stop, open an app, and type something manually. Using voice recognition is much easier when I'm out and about, and by now, when I speak to it in English, it's almost 100 percent accurate."

For any disorganized person, this speed is key. You can make a note of your tasks, shopping list items, upcoming birthdays and anniversaries, and so forth in the moment instead of making a mental note to write it down later when your hands are free (because you're going to forget).

24me

Total Personal Organization Apps

There are a few super-powered smartwatch apps that specialize in helping disorganized people get organized. Two of my favorites are 24me($0.00 at Apple.com)and EasilyDo.

I asked Liat Mordechay Hertanu, co-founder and CMO of 24me, exactly how the 24me Apple Watch app can make people more organized. "The concept is to merge everything related to your schedule into one place," she explained by email. "The app's main screen shows a personalized daily schedule, which includes meetings, reminders, to-dos, notes and other reminders based on personal accounts such as bill payments, Apple reminders, and birthdays..." The app doesn't just give you prompts for what you should be doing. It also carries out some of those tasks. "By tapping on the completion buttons next to the tasks," she wrote, "you can complete tasks from the watch such as: call, email, pay bill, and send gifts."

EasilyDo has similar functionality, so I asked a representative from the company to come up with a scenario in which the app might save a disorganized person from disaster. My contact gave the example of being in an airport with a tight connection. "You're booking it from one flight to the next with a tight layover, and EasilyDo notifies you that the gate has changed," she told me by email. "With one click of the watch, EasilyDo will pull up your boarding pass on your phone, so you're all set to get to your seat, no digging around for a paper boarding pass needed."

Smartwatch, Organized Life

When paired with the right productivity apps, a smartwatch can help steer you toward a more organized life. When we trust our technology to send us the right reminders and prompts, we don't have to keep as much information in our heads, and that frees up our brains to do other more important things.

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About Jill Duffy

Columnist and Deputy Managing Editor, Software

I've been contributing to PCMag since 2011 and am currently the deputy managing editor for the software team. My column, Get Organized, has been running on PCMag since 2012. It gives advice on how to manage all the devices, apps, digital photos, email, and other technology that can make you feel like you're going to have a panic attack.

My latest book is The Everything Guide to Remote Work, which goes into great detail about a subject that I've been covering as a writer and participating in personally since well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

I specialize in apps for productivity and collaboration, including project management software. I also test and analyze online learning services, particularly for learning languages.

Prior to working for PCMag, I was the managing editor of Game Developer magazine. I've also worked at the Association for Computing Machinery, The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, and The American Institute of Physics. I was once profiled in an article in Vogue India alongside Marie Kondo.

Follow me on Mastodon.

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