Sunday Runday
In this weekly column, Android Central Wearables Editor Michael Hicks talks about the world of wearables, apps, and fitness tech related to running and health, in his quest to get faster and more fit.
New Year’s resolutions have taken on a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Cold weather and returning to work sap your motivation. Then you hear excuses about Quitters Day — how “most people” abandon their resolutions by the second Friday in January — and settle back into your old routines because your resolutions were always doomed to fail. Convenient!
Apple referenced Quitters Day in its latest commercial, promising that its Apple Watch will give you “a little extra motivation” to “quit quitting.” It’s a nice idea, but as someone who’s tested most of the best fitness smartwatches, none of them can fundamentally change how you act by buzzing your wrist.
Watch alerts like hourly move reminders or having to log meals in your health app quickly become a source of guilt and annoyance because you feel like you don’t have the bandwidth or energy for them. It’s far too easy to turn these features off or stop using them until the guilt of abandoning your 2025 goals ebbs away.
Smartwatches are only built to reinforce habits and hobbies that you already enjoy, not magically make you love exercise or counting calories.
Watch On
Despite all that, I believe in using tech and New Year’s resolutions to motivate myself. They work for me! I lost 30 pounds last year, ran more miles, hiked more steps than in 2023, and finished more personal projects — all with a Google Doc of resolutions and a smartwatch to motivate me. Believe it or not, I had fun following my resolutions.
Keeping in mind that I don’t know what your New Year’s resolutions for 2025 might be, let me help you “quit quitting” by running through a resolutions template that I think anyone can easily follow and that you can start any time or month, not just January.