6 Helpful Tips for Apple Watch I Use Every Day

Everyone uses their Apple Watch for different purposes, whether it’s having a nifty tech gadget on their wrist with all sorts of communication tools, as a fitness and activity tracker – which is my primary use case, or simply as a watch to check time and other useful information.

Since my own Apple Watch is mostly optimized for fitness and activity tracking purposes, that’s also what most of my utility of the watch is geared around. But there are a few other features of Apple Watch I use constantly as well, so I wanted to share a few of those tips too. And as always, we want to hear from you and what your regular Apple Watch usage and tips are, so share those below!

1: Use a Custom Watch Face with Helpful Info

Since your Apple Watch Face is always visible, I find it helpful to customize the Apple Watch Face so that it shows useful information that is pertinent to me. In my case, this includes the time, weather, the fitness/activity wheel, and I like to have the heart rate monitor on there too.

How you want your Apple Watch Face to look depends on how you use the device and your own wishes, and that’s great, so just remember it’s very easy to customize Apple Watch by tapping-and-holding on the Apple Watch Face when you’re wearing it, where you can set, edit, and customize the right watch face for you.

Bonus related tip: I use the red watch face colors to try and reduce blue light exposure, which I get plenty of through my other screens. To be honest I don’t necessarily like the look of the red watch faces, but I am hoping the blue light reduction makes it worthwhile. Anyway, you might find that a worthwhile experience to try yourself, or you might find it too garish to be acceptable.

2: Use the Fitness Tracking Tools

This is specific to my primary personal usage of Apple Watch as a fitness tracker, but I use the Fitness app to track all of my workouts when wearing Apple Watch. It’ll show helpful information specific to the workout, including heart rate, duration of workout, calories burned (which, as it turns out for me, it’s much easier to simply avoid the bowl of ice cream than to try to run it off after the fact), or if it’s run, walk, or bike ride, it’ll show distance, and even heart rate zone information too.

Using Fitness app is super easy, just launch it on your Apple Watch, select the workout you’re going to do, and proceed.

I use the Fitness app nearly every day, which I aim to have some degree of physical activity on a regular basis, whether it’s a walk, bike ride, formal workout, or otherwise.

3: Ping Your Lost iPhone to Help Find It

As hard as I try to put my iPhone in the same place, I still find myself misplacing my iPhone not infrequently. Maybe I set it down somewhere that slipped my mind, maybe someone else moved the iPhone, maybe it fell out of a pocket on the couch or in the car, whatever the case, misplacing an iPhone can be frustrating and even distressing. If you have an Apple Watch, you can use it to ping the misplaced iPhone, making it easy to locate.

Just press the side tall button (not the rotating one) and tap the Ping iPhone button, and the iPhone will make a chiming sound.

I use this incredibly often, probably embarrassingly often, and it’s by far the simplest way to find a misplaced iPhone.

4: Use Silent Mode

My least favorite thing about Apple Watch is that it makes noise and sounds, which I find very distracting. I basically never want to hear any kind of noise from my wrist. Fortunately, you can easily toggle on Silent Mode, which will keep the Apple Watch completely silent but it will still vibrate with a notification or inbound phone call.

Press the long side button, then tap on the Bell icon to enable Silent Mode, keeping your Apple Watch completely silent and noise free.

5: Use the Heart Rate Monitor for Brief Activity, Cool Downs, and for Relaxing

Because I have the heart rate monitor visible on my Apple Watch Face at all times, and I primarily use my Apple Watch as a fitness tracker, I also frequently access and use the Heart Rate Monitor.

I like to use the heart rate monitor for some activities that are kind of brief, like walking up a few flights of stairs, or when cooling down after a workout, and also even sometimes when relaxing where it has become a bit of a personal challenge to see how much I can impact my heart rate – up or down – through breathing alone.

6: Use Siri for Reminders

My primary use case for Siri is basically as a reminder engine, and I use this feature on my Apple Watch daily. I use either Raise to Siri (where you lift your wrist to activate), and the long-press on the round dial button to activate Siri, then I simply inform Siri of the task; “Hey Siri, remind me to take out the garbage this evening at 5pm”.

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What about you? What are your most used Apple Watch tips?

So that’s my handful of helpful Apple Watch tips I use pretty much every day, but what about you? If you have an Apple Watch, what are your most used features and tips for the device? Do you have a particular approach to the Apple Watch Face you prefer? Share your own thoughts, experiences, and tips in the comments!