I find the opposite to be true - with a smart watch I can glance at what the notifications are about and avoid reaching for my phone for way longer.

Yep I'm super happy with my nasty old android watch for exactly this reason.

I mentioned this elsewhere but I really like hybrid smart watches for this - battery on my withings scanwatch goes 20 days, does notifications OK, activity longing, sleep tracking, HR monitoring.

Features I'm missing from galaxy watch are find my phone and answering phone on the watch, but it's so much lighter I don't need to take it off (the bulky strap on my galaxy watch would bother me when resting my hands on laptop edge), and it's very low key - I can wear it in any setting. Smart watches look like toys to me TBH.

This makes sense, but I guess personal disposition makes a difference.

I don't get the problem here. You're able to select which notifications are allowed to come through to the watch.

I only have notifications from a few apps allowed to come through, and out of those I also filter them with the in-app settings to only get ones I'm interested in getting pinged about.

I never get more notifications than I can handle, and especially not ones I don't want to be harassed by.

So why don’t you disable the notifications you don’t like?

I don't know how to answer to these points, especially in tech debates.

"Why don't you put your phone in flight mode?" "Why don't you turn off the internet" "Why don't you just turn off your PC and go to sleep"

The questions are easy. The actions are too damn hard to pull off.

Turning off notifications is a set and forget thing. It’s a setting. It’s not a habit, not a technique, not a vague concept. It is a literal toggle switch.

Is it ? Is it too damn hard to turn off notifications? I fail to see how disabling one feature is equivalent to Airplane mode or turning off a PC which disables multiple functionalities (with the later making it unusable). The matters are obviously not solutions since other use cases require their useless. Turning off notifications have no effect on any other feature of the watch.

When you get a notification on your watch, spend 5 seconds thinking "Do I want this notification on my watch?" This question is apparently the easy part.

Now for the "hard" part: swipe to the left on the notification, tap the "..." button, and tap "Turn Off on Apple Watch". Now you won't get notifications from that app on your watch. Should take you about 2 seconds.

> The actions are too damn hard to pull off.

Wow, I am surprised by this sentiment. In iOS notifications are an opt-in situation, I just never turn them on for anything but the smallest subset of apps (iMessage, Discord, Slack, Signal currently). For those apps I’m super aggressive about limiting noise, I’ll unsubscribe to things and tweak notification settings literally every time I get spam.

It has been pretty easy for me because they let you filter exactly which apps can notify your watch.

I find this complaint surprising. You can turn notifications off. I have everything disabled apart from health metrics on my watch.

Just turn off those notifications