10 essential Apple Watch features you need to enable yourself

The Apple Watch is packed with cool features available as soon as you sync it with your iPhone. Immediately, it starts receiving phone notifications, tracking your workouts, magically pairing your AirPods through your Apple account, and more. However, there are other essential features that you should enable yourself, whether because you want to take your laptop to the next level or want more customization. Some of these essential features can be as important as setting up a sleep schedule, quickly finding your AirTag with Apple Watch, or even Apple’s walkie-talkie feature.

While customers love their Apple Watch for its exclusive features, new watchOS updates bring new possibilities for this device, which is a customer favorite for tracking workout metrics, tracking your health data, and controlling an iPhone.

Plus, most of these essential features are available not only on the latest Apple Watch models, but also on older ones, as these smartwatches still offer a lot of value and can be used to improve your work, sleep, or workout.

If you want to know how well your body rests after a night out, a long workout, or a regular day at the office, the best way to do this is to set a sleep schedule. This feature has been available for a few years and all you have to do is set a Sleep Focus so the Apple Watch can not only track your sleep zones, but also your wrist temperature, blood oxygen and heart rate. Using this data, Apple and third-party apps can give you better information about your sleep, whether you woke up during the night, and whether you met your sleep goal.

To start using this feature, open Control Center on iPhone, press the Focus button and select Sleep mode. There you can set your sleep schedule and find out if you want to relax for a few minutes before the function actually activates – this will also be available on the watch.

Another important feature that builds on the iPhone’s Focus mode is the ability to automatically swap watch faces. In iPhone’s different focus modes, users can select custom wallpapers and watch faces to better reflect the time of day, such as when working out, in a meeting, enjoying the weekend or even before bed. This is a cool feature that helps you explore multiple watch faces.

With watchOS 11, Apple allows users pause their activity rings at will, which was one of the biggest updates to the Apple Watch for workouts and activity streaks. By tapping your ringtones on Apple Watch, you can change your goals or pause ringtones by taking a break for a day, until the next Monday, the next month, or for as long as you want. This way you don’t lose your activity streak and can give yourself time to rest, recover from an injury or enjoy your vacation. Third-party apps, like Gentler Streak, offer a better approach to Apple’s Activity Rings. Gentler Streak comes with an activity path that includes a wider range of your body’s capabilities, always reminding you that rest days are as important as practice.

Besides the ability to pause ringtones, a fourth feature that’s essential for Apple Watch users, but one that you have to enable yourself, is the ability to personalize workouts. Once in the Workouts app, users can tap the three dots next to an exercise and create specific rules or metrics for that workout. Runners have several features to improve their outdoor runs, for example, while swimmers can set how they will swim and the length of the pool they are in. With this, Apple Watch users can go the extra mile when tracking their workouts, all using Apple’s solutions.

Introduced with the Apple Watch Series 7 and its larger screen, you can use a full on-screen QWERTY keyboard on Apple’s wearable devices. With this, you can type any query on Siri that you can’t or don’t want to say out loud. On Apple Watch, go to Settings, select Accessibility, tap Siri, and turn on Type to Siri. To trigger the experience, simply press and hold the Digital Crown to bring up the keyboard. With a new Siri experience coming with watchOS 27, this could be much more useful, as the personal assistant will be able to use personal data and access more complex information by searching the Internet.

The sixth essential feature that Apple Watch users need to enable themselves is changing notification permissions. Yes, it’s great to get all the notifications on your wrist at first because you don’t need to pick up your phone and you can always stay up to date with what’s going on. However, if you start getting bombarded by multiple group chats or keep getting annoying notifications from apps that aren’t really important, then you know how annoying it can be to have your wrist buzzing every five seconds.

Luckily, you can swipe left on a notification in Control Center, tap the three dots, and choose to turn off notifications, cast silently, or adjust app-specific permissions. Still, I recommend doing it in the iPhone settings simply because it’s faster.

The seventh essential feature of Apple Watches can be tricky, as the proper experience requires a newer model of Apple Watch and the AirTag 2. However, if you have an Apple Watch Series 9, Ultra 2, or newer model, you can use Precision Search with the smartwatch to locate the AirTag. And if you have an Apple Watch Series 11 or Ultra 3, this technology will work further, as both devices have the U2 chip. To take advantage of this feature, users need to go to the Control Center and add the Find AirTag widget. Then select one of the AirTags to make this quick connection, such as those kept in the keychain.

The eighth essential feature is also related to the Apple Watch Control Center – and I’ve offered this before – which is the ability to customize it. Much like the iPhone’s Control Center, the Apple Watch is highly customizable, but many people don’t do anything with it. Since watchOS 11, users can open Control Center, scroll down, and tap Edit. From there, they can remove tools they don’t use very often and even browse new ones. Apple offers several suggestions, widgets, and third-party apps that may have Control Center integration that makes them much quicker to use.

The ninth feature that most users forget is available since watchOS 5: the Walkie-Talkie application. This push-to-talk voice tool hasn’t gotten a lot of love from Apple over the past couple of years, but it was the primary way I communicated with my friends for a while. Connecting is quick and easy, but you have to set it up yourself. When you open the Walkie-Talkie app, tap the Add icon to invite a contact. Once they accept it, you can activate your availability. Press and hold that contact’s talk button to talk, then release it. Once you receive a response, you will receive a buzz. After raising your wrist, the audio message will play.

Finally, Apple Pay is a very handy feature that you should set up. This is available from the original Apple Watch and, as you know, is a secure way to make contactless purchases using credit or debit cards linked to your Apple Wallet. Although the initial setup of Apple Watch already gives you the ability to sign in with the cards you use most, you can also do it later in the Watch app on iPhone by selecting Wallet & Apple Pay, then Add Card. Once registered, you can double-click the side button to pay for things or use Express Transit in cities like Paris, London, and New York to authenticate your transit card at the terminal without double-clicking the side button.