This striking Apple Watch face concept shows exactly how you spend your time

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Apple Watch Planning Mode Face Concept
Apple Watch Planning Mode Face Concept (Image credit: Fons Mans)

What you need to know

  • A new Apple Watch concept shows us how great third-party watch faces could be.
  • This watch face concept shows a design that updates based on how much time people spend doing certain things.
  • The watch face would use calendar entries to popular on-screen data.

A stunning new Apple Watch face concept shows how people are spending their time based on the content of their calendars.

As we await the announcement of watchOS 9 at this year's WWDC event in June, not to mention the Apple Watch Series 8 launch later this year, one hope is that Apple will finally allow third-party watch faces to be offered. People have been creating concepts of new watch faces for years and the latest imagines what could be done with a face that changes based on the time we spend doing things.

Created by designer Fons Mans, the Planning View watch face shows an analog clock for the time with the bulk of the face made up of sections that show how we're spending time. Those sections use our calendar entries to get a feel for timescales while the current time block is displayed front and center. There's also space for four small complications — one in each corner.

Here's how Mans describes the watch face concept:

Apple Watch face concept — Planning view

  • Showing how your upcoming 12 hours are arranged
  • Current 'timeblock' is highlighted
  • Icons are linked to your different calendars, so you can see how much time you spend on different projects

While Apple doesn't currently offer custom watch faces in watchOS 8 software or the Apple Watch Series 7 hardware, there is always hope that something will change in the future. Apple is likely to announce the Apple Watch software for 2022 in June and while new health capabilities are always welcome, the addition of support for third-party watch faces is undoubtedly high on many people's wishlists.

I know I'd love to see what talented developers and designers could come up with if they were given free rein over how our watches looked and functioned! That would absolutely be the best Apple Watch feature added this year, that's for sure.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.