Procrastinating Ourselves to Death
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“Time to stand!”
My wrist gets a buzz. The tiny computer strapped around it lights up with a message, rendered in lilac-blue: I am sitting, the watch informs me. I shouldn’t be. The screen sends the same reminder—cheery, vaguely judgy—several times a day. Sometimes I find myself refusing to heed, in an act of petty rebellion. And some of those times, I find myself wondering, as I stay in the chair, What exactly am I defying?
Watches mark time; they also impose it. I got the “smart” version of one as a gift over the holidays, and I thought of it, at first, as a way to add some order to a stretch of time that felt out of control. I’d been sleeping badly; quantifying the badness, I thought, might be the first step toward fixing it. If I could understand the rhythms of those wayward hours—the deep sleep, the REM sleep, the stretches of enervating wakefulness—maybe I could improve the rest, and with that, my life overall. My “new watch, new you” hopes soon expanded: I kept the “Stand!” reminders and the default step-counter. I added hourly exhortations to drink water. To help things along, I bought one of
