A month or so ago I sold my Garmin Fenix 7 on Ebay. It was a terrific fitness watch, had been through wars, and I felt badly getting rid of it. I used it for years for backcountry and downhill skiing, hiking, swimming, rock climbing, biking, and running. And I used it for a lot of running. Thousands of miles of running.
Here is what my Garmin Fenix 7 looked like when I listed it for sale:
It was, you can see, in reasonably good shape, albeit with a few dings around the bezel, mostly from dropping the watch on hard surfaces, not from more manly things like rock climbing or violent bike crashes.
But that it was in decent shape is not what strikes me now. What strikes me instead is the ridiculous watch face I was using. It displayed eight different pieces of data:
- Battery
- Altitude
- Date
- Unread messages
- Current heartrate
- Steps
- Weather
- Sunset/sunrise
Why did I need to know all that stuff? And why did they each seem like something I needed to know so urgently that they all merited a place on the Fenix display? The honest answer is ... I have no idea. It just was what I did.
I only got thinking about this because I replaced my Fenix with a Garmin Forerunner 265. And there are two things worth noting about my new device:
- While it is newer, it is not able to track as many activities. So, golf, for example, is off the menu.
- The 265 would have handled my old watch face just fine, and almost certainly made it look prettier.
I bought the device for two main reasons. First, the old device was a wrist brick. It was huge, both in terms of thickness and diameters. which began to seem ridiculous. Second, it was missing a few features, like training readiness, which I thought needed.
But something unexpected happened. I found myself asking me questions about what data I needed to see, and why.
- What do I need to know?
- Why do I need to know it now?
- What can be done about it?
These are three big questions I usually ask me about fitness data, but I wasn't applying it to my watch. And the answer, about most fitness data, is that I don't need to know it, can't do much about it, and definitely don't need to see it all the time.
Realizing this, I radically simplified my approach to ambient watch data. All that data on my old watch was gone.
Here is the watch face on my current Garmin. It is an alien data landscape.
Analog watch face? Just the current date? It was almost frightening at first. Where is all the other stuff that this watch can do? Why isn't it visible? Am I doing this wrong?
I think I'm finally doing it right, honestly. I still track heart rate when running, especially when doing intervals, But I don't all need all that other clutter the rest of the time. So, it is gone. And now when I look at the old Fenix watch face, I mostly feel chronoaltibatterystepcardio anxiety. So many things to worry about. Gone.
The beauty of my new approach is its restraint. I've pared down my watch face to just two pieces of information: time and date. That's it. Nothing more. And it's liberating.
This minimalism isn't just about a watch face. It's a metaphor for how we think about health, about simplifying things, about getting rid of complications, like unnecessary data. I had all that information but was never sure why, other than to hoard it and look at it, like the dragon Smaug sitting on his hoard.
The epiphany was about my original data questions: What do I need to know? When do I need to know it? What can be done about it if I know it?
Because for running, for fitness, for life, the answers are surprisingly simple. Am I moving? Am I happy? Am I healthy? Those are the metrics that matter. Constant awareness to everything else rapidly turns into ambient clutter. Sure, structured workouts are important, and I couldn't do them as well without my watch, and they require more data on each segment, but I don't need all that data all the time. Most of my old ambient data is noise about which I can do nothing, or at least didn't need to be shown all the time.
My old Fenix 7, with its eight-data-point watch face, now feels like a relic of a more anxious time. My new approach—with its absent data—is no longer a mere fitness tracker. It's a statement. A rebellion against digital complexity. It is a finger in the eye of the idea that more data always matters.
Try it. Simplify, simplify.
