I was recently in a meeting with someone wearing an Apple Watch. We were busy discussing something as a group, and this person had a reminder go off on her watch that she should stand up and walk around. She gently slipped her hand under the desk, and shook her wrist from side to side until the watch had recorded a successful "stand" for the hour.
The Apple Watch uses gamification to encourage healthy behaviors. Standing for at least a minute every hour, exercising for thirty minutes a day, and achieving a minimum number of calories burned are all meaningful goals. But when we find ourselves engaging in behaviors that focus on the gamification, and not the results we're after, it's worth pausing to reflect.
I'm as guilty of this as my fellow Apple Watch-wearing meeting attendee. I was recently very generously gifted a mechanical watch, and my first instinct was to hesitate wearing it. "I'll break the streak on my Apple Watch! I'm on track to close my rings for the whole year!"
Over the long term, though, what matters most is not the points we've scored or the badges we've earned. We'll care about whether or not we had healthy habits, and what those habits enabled us to do.
For me, personally, my daily routine involves a fair bit of walking, being on my feet, and exercise — which the Apple Watch certainly helped confirm. But continuing to wear it every day, just for the sake of completing an artificial metric, doesn't make much sense.
This doesn't mean that the Apple Watch isn't useful, or that wearing it every day isn't a great option for some people. In fact, some of the heart rate monitoring features make it essential for a certain segment of the population. I believe what's important is that whatever points or badges we're striving for actually connect with whatever real-life behaviors we're interested in.
Naval Ravikant is fond of the saying, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." What's stupid or not is entirely subjective, but I try to remind myself of this whenever I think about how many Twitter followers I have or any other personal metric. Gamification is great, provided the game is something we actually want to win.