We were never watch-free, we were wrist watch free. By the same token, we've had smart watches for a long time; smart pocket watches that we for some reason call "smart phones".
Those are the ones, yeah. It lives in my pocket and it tells me the time - that's a pocket watch, in my book. It just became an electronic computer instead of a mechanical computer, and progressed like the rest of computing...
Here's a couple that I found with a Google Books search:
"The Stress factor: thriving emotionally and spiritually in the turbulent 90s" (1992) - "Type A people easily become slaves to the clock. They are constantly looking at their watches, checking calendars, reviewing their daily diaries and lists of things to do, crossing off this and adding that, and endeavoring in every way to cram ..."
"Man and the Stars" (1978) - "It was only recently, while my wrist-watch was being repaired, that I came to realize how widely it is assumed that the good citizen knows the time, at least to the nearest five minutes. The law, for example, takes it for granted that somehow or other, the law-abiding motorist knows the time. ... If, for a moment, we could turn the clock back to the what our history books call the Middle Ages ... They were not, like us, slaves to the clock."
and a close match, with "Jay Walking: the ultimate fitness journey" (1998) - "So how come we become so stressed about time? It seems as though we wear time around our ankles, like a ball and chain, becoming slaves to the clock."
It might be interesting to purchase a cheap, digital one with stopwatch functionality.
One could keep track of how much time is spent on their iWatch: reading reviews, purchasing, reading the TOS and manual, customizing, purchasing apps, recharging, answering questions from interested parties, and possibly deleting ads.
