Personally, I find setting the time much more annoying than the date, especially if the watch has a quick-set date.
My brain just filters it right out.
I find it a valuable adaptation for folks who like to rotate between various mechanical watches and don't care to keep them all on winders.
(Which, let's face it, also adds wear and tear on the watches. Each of my mech watches gets worn maaaaybe two days per month and I expect this to really extend their lives. We'll see.)
But, watches are very personal. There's no right or wrong way to do the hobby as long as you're having fun!
This is doubly hilarious because I can no longer read the date window on most of my watches for one reason or another. The "cyclops" on my Rolex is scuffed, which obscures its date window, for example. Sadder is the fact that my resistance to progressives means the Seamaster's non-magnified date window may as well be theoretical to my 52 year old eyes. LOL.
(What's REALLY funny is the sheer TININESS of the date window on my wife's lady-sized Doxa dive watch. I have NO idea how anyone could ever actually USE it, and yet they ship it with a date movement.)
I treat my watch as my "approximate time" device. I usually set it a few minutes fast on purpose. If I need the exact time or the exact date I look at my phone.
But don't worry. I have a host of other OCD behaviors around watches!
I know if I go to the safe to put on, say, my Omega, I might just put it right back in there if the delta between the actual date and the date when the watch stopped is too large. LOL. I've got some no-dates (mostly dressier, hand-wound), or I can roll the dice on one of the other date-window autos.
I'm especially glad in those moments that I don't have any day-dates.
When I was a kid in the 70s, the Success Token most of the upper-middle-class men I knew opted for (if they opted for one) was a Rolex. It was usually either:
- A Submariner in all steel (think 60s Bond); or
- A steel Datejust on a two-tone Jubilee bracelet with a champagne face (a color scheme aped by a million Citizens and Seikos); or
- An all-gold Day-Date on a gold President bracelet (think Tony Soprano).
My dad took the middle path.