Hello, friend. This is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Text City. Same good content. Just the old name. Enjoy.

From WNYC, this is New Text City, where digital gets personal. I'm a new summer Odie, this week.

The hype. The excitement. The Apple Watch. But as you know, we don't do gadget reviews here.

We do human analysis. So get ready for what the watch could mean, potentially for our productivity, our brains, and of course our time.

We have one more thing.

So what did Apple develop its new watch? Smartphone sales have been going great. The company sold nearly 75 million of them in the last three months of 2014 alone.

It was Apple's best quarter ever. What could another gadget possibly do that our phones don't?

Well, wired magazine in a really excellent article that's worth checking out. It reports that Apple realized our phones are, and I'm quoting here, that our phones are ruining our lives.

And so Apple wants to solve our problem with technology with more technology.

And using Apple Watch during the day is really about brief interactions. Many of these are just a few seconds long.

This is Kevin Lynch, Apple's vice president of technology speaking at a recent watch announcement.

And he was also quoted in that wired article. I want to read you my favorite quote.

He says, people are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much they want that level of engagement, he says.

But then he asks, how do we provide it in a way that's a little more human, a little more in the moment?

And he thinks that's the Apple Watch. Well, to help me figure out if the Apple Watch can indeed make us act a little more human,

I'm so pleased to have the New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjou with me on the line from San Francisco.

Hi, good to be here. Thanks for being here. Okay, so Farhad, you spent a week with the Apple Watch.

Can you just sum up how you felt about it? What the experience generally was like?

Yeah, actually, it's been more than a week now. I actually still have it on right now.

It's been pretty interesting. It's a strange device because it took some time to get used to.

And it wasn't obvious at first what it was for, why I really needed it, and why I was putting in so much effort to learn how to use it.

But I stuck with it. I mean, it's kind of my job to stick with the stuff. So I stuck with it.

...