fbpx

FREE! Plan Your Ideal Week: Bonus Workshop + Planner  →  Get the Workshop

My Apple Watch Battery Ruined My Perfect 2-Year Activity Streak

August 10, 2020
by Shawn Blanc

One night back in June, my Apple watch wasn’t quite connected to its charger.

This happens from time to time. I’ll wake up and when I go to put on the Watch, I’ll see that it only has 20-percent battery remaining. When that happens, I put the Watch back on the charger and give it a half hour to charge back up while I make coffee and do some writing.

But this time was different. I didn’t realize until later in the day that my Watch battery had died. I was in the middle of an early afternoon meeting at the time, and then several hours went by and I had completely forgotten that I was walking around with my Watch on even though the battery was dead.

At the end of the day, when I went to set my Watch back on the charger, I remembered it had been out of battery.

The first thing I thought about was, naturally, how full my Activity Rings were.

I checked on the Activity app in my iPhone to see that my Watch had only recorded a couple of standing hours, and about one-third of my normal activity.

That was the first day since October 2018 that my Apple Watch didn’t “complete” all my activity rings.

I was going to go back in to the Health app the next day and manually add my activity. But, well, I was lazy and never did.

A few weeks later, my family and I went camping for a few days in Colorado.

Of course, my Apple Watch died because, well, we were out in a forest in the mountains and I didn’t bother to bring any chargers.

That meant there were three days in a row that my Watch didn’t record any activity whatsoever, despite the fact I was up from sunrise to sunset going on hikes, rowing a canoe, walking around a lake, and cutting logs for firewood.

About a year ago, when I completed my first 365 days of perfect activity, I was curious as to why Apple didn’t have an award for having a perfect activity year, the same way they do for a perfect week.

But then, after my streak was “broken” over this summer because of the Apple Watch’s battery, I think I know why Apple doesn’t have that 365 award.

Imagine how frustrating it would be to work toward that award, only to have the streak broken because of a hardware failure of some sort.

The week- and month-long challenge awards are much more attainable. And if, for whatever reason, you don’t complete all your rings one day during a week or month, you can start back over pretty . It’s a shorter cycle to reset.

As I write this, I am less than 60 days away from completing my second year — 731 days1 — of perfect activity rings on my Apple Watch….

But will it count?

In some ways, it makes me sad that I won’t have those 731 days worth of perfectly completed circles all in a row, the way I did for the first 365 days.

But on the other hand, so what?

I know it for myself. I have developed a workout habit, and not a day goes by that I don’t spend at least 15-20 minutes doing something intentional for my physical health.2

The Apple Watch played a critical role in helping me build a daily workout habit. But I am now able to maintain that habit without the need to keep track of it every single day.

In short, I don’t care about the daily tracking as much as I used to.

I still wear my Apple Watch every day. There are many things I love about it beyond the fitness tracking.

But I’m not as singularly obsessed with closing all my Activity Rings as I used to be. Meaning… if the watch battery dies on me during the day, I don’t worry about it.

Nearly two years of closing my daily activity rings has brought a significant, overall shift in my health.

There is so much more that goes in to play with being healthy: my diet, sleep, drinking water, taking care of my body, etc…

My goal is not to work out every day… my goal is to be healthy. Daily workouts are merely a part of my habit and system for staying healthy.

Being intentional and actually caring about my health… that is what matters to me in the end.

Side note: After my first six months of daily workouts, I wrote about three things that helped me build that habit.

Our Must-Have, Most Used Productivity Apps

We spend an inordinate amount of time sorting through hundreds of apps to find the very best. We put together a short list of our must-have, most-used apps for increasing productivity.

Send me the roundup »

  1. 731 = (365 x 2) + 1 because 2020 is a Leap Year. ↩

  2. My quarantine workout routine mostly consists of alternating each day between a row machine and then lifting with free weights or Kettle Bells. ↩