Apple Watch settings
August 14, 2020 at 8:49 AM by Dr. Drang
Recently, I had some trouble with my Apple Watch and had to unpair/re-pair it. In the process, the watch’s settings were lost. I was reminded of this yesterday when I crossed my arms and the watch announced the time. After Googling for the way to stop that, I decided to make a Note to accumulate all the settings I’ve used to get the watch working the way I want.
The crossed-arm problem is solved by turning off the Speak Time setting in the Watch app’s Clock section.
It’s not that I’m actually putting two fingers on the watch face, but something about the way my right arm touches the face when I cross my arms sets this off. Since I have never deliberately used this feature to get the watch to announce the time, turning it off is an easy call.
After turning off Speak Time, I remembered that I missed a phone call earlier in the day, presumably because my watch didn’t alert me (my phone is always on silent). In this case, I actually remembered the setting that allows me to mute the watch accidentally. It’s the Cover to Mute setting in Sound & Haptics.
Again, I’ve never muted my watch on purpose by covering its face, but I’ve done it inadvertently many times. A couple of years ago, this happened so often I thought someone was gaslighting me. Whenever I learned that I’d missed an alert, I checked the settings to find that Silent Mode was on. It was months before I realized that Cover to Mute wasn’t a temporary thing to silence a single alert, but a permanent switch to Silent Mode. I still think the description of how it works is poorly worded.
Anyway, I’m sure that more of these will come up over the next few weeks, as I find my watch alerting me when I don’t want it to and not alerting me when I do. Whenever I figure out the fix, I’ll take a screenshot and add it to my Apple Watch Settings note.
I decided to make the images small (tap and hold on an image and choose Small Images from the popup menu) because I think the text alone will usually be enough to remind me of what I need to do.
Update Aug 14, 2020 8:57 AM Not five minutes after publishing, I got one of those stupid “You’re doing great! Keep it up!” notifications. So I’ve added turning off the Daily Coaching setting to my note.
