How to use the Calendar complication to boost your productivity

After picking up my Apple Watch last April I switched between face after face, moving from Simple to Solar, from Micky (for my sins) to Astronomy and, eventually, at long last, to a setup I’ve stuck with: Modular for weekdays, and Utility for weekends.

Why the difference? Well, because soon after playing around with the Modular face (which I love as much for its emphasis on multicolor as anything else), I realised that the face’s big center-stage complication could boost my productivity. In short, I use it to notify me of everything I need to remember in my day job at intervals throughout the day. I think this is perhaps one of Modular’s most underused features, and I really want to tell you about it.

The setup I’m using is simple enough, but it honestly works a treat. I have Modular configured with the small date complication in the top left, the large Calendar complication in the middle, and then small Activity, Weather, and Outlook complications running along the bottom.

Modular’s Calendar complication importantly shows your next upcoming appointment: it displays the time this is set to occur, the name of the appointment, and even where it’s supposed to happen. That’s a lot of at-a-glance information which updates in the background and is usefully available each time you check the time. And before you ask: yes, I did use the Reminders app in the early days of testing this setup. But I found myself hitting “snooze” more often than I’d have liked. This way, you’re casually warned of the event long before it’s due, and if you want to set an alert then you can do this inside of the Calendar iOS app, too. You can also Time Travel to see events which are coming up.

So now, everything I need to remember throughout the day indeed goes into Calendar. Sure, before the Apple Watch I wasn’t a huge user of the application, but Modular has made me a fan of the Calendar app. Regular appointments and, more importantly, random events appear on-screen as they approach. And because of this, I never forget anything these days. Ever.

In this way, Calendar has become something of an everything bucket for me, but one for everything I need to remember. Before I used this setup things sometimes used to slip my mind; it’s hard to grab for your appointment book when a meeting is arranged through shooting a handful of passing words at a colleague in a school corridor. But with Calendar’s Modular complication (which, of course, you can add to using the age-old “Hey Siri, create an event for…” command), it’s easy to quickly bookmark stuff that’s on the horizon and get a heads-up reminder closer to the time.

And the Utility face for the weekend — well, isn’t that more straightforward? Because nobody wants to be reminded of work at the weekend. Not even me.