apple watch: be on time

The many ways that Apple’s wearable helps you avoid lateness

Use Apple Watch to keep on top of your day

The point of having a watch is to make sure that we do whatever we need to in a timely manner.

The Apple Watch is changing how we do that – expanding from ‘telling you the time’ to add things like letting you know when your next calendar appointment is, or buzzing you with an alarm when it’s time to do something, or even letting you know that the traffic is bad so you don’t wind up late through no fault of your own. The aim is the same as a traditional watch, it’s just that the technology used is capable of a lot more.

The aural and haptic feedback from the Watch also makes it extremely difficult to miss an important notification or alert, so even though your phone can do all the things we’re talking about, the Watch really is the best way to make sure you don’t miss a thing.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to set alarms and timers right from your Watch itself, and how its built-in mapping tools can help avoid those aforementioned travel woes.

There are even different ways to get a view of what you have coming up depending on which Watch face you choose, so we’ll run through that as well. Being able to quickly look ahead and check what’s on your planner for the day is definitely another bonus to having a mini computer on your wrist.

Notification needling

One thing we don’t mention elsewhere in this tutorial is notifications, because we’ve assumed you’ll use Apple’s built-in apps.

If you use third-party apps – a calendar app such as Fantastical, for example, or a reminders app such as Due – you’ll need to make sure you have notifications turned on for those apps on your Watch, otherwise you might miss something vital.

In the Watch app on your iPhone, you can control the notifications for every app individually (in the Notifications option, funnily enough). We’d suggest turning on the red dot to indicate unread notifications if you haven’t already (this is the top option). Then scroll down until you see the list of third-party apps. You can flick the switch on any one you use to make notifications for that app on your Watch mirror those shown on your iPhone.

The final step is to make sure that you actually notice the alerts! In the Sounds & Haptics menu, make sure the audio alerts are loud enough, and haptics are buzzy enough for you to feel them.