Somewhere in the throes of 2013, I realized my wrist was dumb. And I wanted to increase its IQ. I had two options: enroll my wrist in night school or slap a smartwatch on it. Fitbit, Samsung Gear, Android Wear, Apple Watch, Garmin Wristacular Spectacular, and the recently-departed Pebble all provided handy night school alternatives to educate my vapid limb.

I plunged wrist-first into the exciting, yet doomed-to-fail market of HD-DVDs, err, wearable tech! I’ve worn a $200 Android Wear by Asus, a $150 Fitbit Charge HR, and a $250 Pebble Time Round. But none came close to the brilliance of my most recent wearable innovation: a $14 Japanese sports watch. The smartest watch I ever purchased doesn’t even have a GED, so how did it beat those Ivy League brats?

In the past few months, I’ve threatened to eliminate “smart” from my life. No smartwatch, no smartphone. I was on the brink of time-traveling to the 90s where the only phones were the kind that plugged into a wall, permanently.

But I didn’t jump off that diving board into a pool of Luddites; Google Maps was too important. I still have my smartphone, but I’ve removed nearly every distraction from it. Gone are all the applications I kept to receive notifications from them rather than check them when it suited me.

I spared GMail, Pushbullet, and YouTube, the last vestiges of my always-on connection to the web. I eliminated anything else that dared to snipe my attention span with .50 caliber updates. I’m a free human again, mostly.

I got into smartwatches to combat the incessant demand my phone drew from my eyeballs. I wanted to leave my phone in my pocket rather than repeatedly and clumsily fetch it with my meat-hooks. That behavior was especially wasteful because 9 of every 10 notifications went something like this: “a friend you don’t recognize just posted for the first time in a while on Instagram and you should congratulate their momentous achievement.”

I soon realized that I was treating this action as a habit beyond my control. So I thought, hey Stanley, how about you not take out your god-damned phone, buddy? The thing is, humans like ourselves are defenseless against the new. A new piece of information is like a bacon-wrapped sugar candy with a chewy cocaine center. It’s nearly impossible to avoid because our minds are wired to pay attention to change.

And push notifications offered the shittiest kind of change: they grabbed attention for the sake of grabbing attention. I hoped the smartwatch would reduce my phone usage, and in some ways, it did. A quick glance at the watch would determine whether I would burn additional calories to retrieve my distract-o-brick from its pocket cave, or if I let it be.

But the watch never went ignored. Whenever I felt the buzz on my wrist, I immediately turned to face it. Toward the later stage of my smartwatch ownership, this response became autonomic. On her death bed, my mother presented her last wishes and hold on a second mom — oh, it’s going to be 75° and sunny this weekend, nice — what were you saying? Mom? MOM!? Okay, just kidding, but seriously.

Shortly after I donned my dumb watch, the SKMEI WR 5BAR, I learned that I wasn’t going to kick my wrist-glancing reflex anytime soon. When I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket, I instinctively looked at my dunce of a sports watch and expected to see yet another headline from a Starbucks email campaign: “We’re showering you with gold this month, Stanley!”

But no, the watch remained steadfast in its mission to show me the time, the date, and nothing else. And when the watch occasionally rubbed up against a wall, piece of furniture, or the skin of another human in the throes of passionate lovemaking (preferably with me), the rubbery surface gently vibrated.

And this rubbing triggered the same reflex. I would interrupt coitus, or whatever I was doing, to examine the watch face. And to my delight, the watch repeated the same old song and dance, like some one-hit-wonder pop star reliving the good ol’ days. I hope that my mind will unlearn this behavior soon and make room for a more useful reflex.

Despite these minor neurological setbacks, my mentally-handicapped $14 watch has every aspect of “smart” that I require. It doesn’t measure my heart rate, my steps, or my cholesterol levels. But it keeps track of my most important resource: time. Unfortunately, the popularity of the wrist watch has waned in recent decades due to competition from smarter devices.

Today, nearly every person on the planet can give me the time. They pull out their phone, press the lock button to reveal the screen, and voila, there’s the time. And the phone’s internal clock synchronizes with a network provider whose time-telling is God-like in its authority: accurate to a T.

Time is critical to us all; it helps us answer life’s most challenging questions. Am I late to brunch? When can I pencil in that intimate 5-hour hair removal treatment? How long before I stop comparing post-Breaking Bad Brian Cranston to Breaking Bad’s Brian Cranston? Time alone can answer these questions.

And for over 10 years, smart devices acted as the primary harbingers of my time. But the problem with looking at a phone or a smartwatch to read the time is obvious: it opens me up to those same distractions I am so desperate to avoid.

Imagine your phone is in your purse or your pocket. Just by retrieving the device to check the time, you’ve initiated an action that, 5 times out of 4, leads to unlocking the phone and dicking around — or if you’re a lady, vagina-ing around. Even Apple’s Watch, with its limited access to device capabilities, can throw a bunch of delectable stats at you, like how many steps you walked today.

“Ooh, my steps aren’t so hot. Maybe I should dig into my entire health history to see if I’ve made any progress? You know, just to make sure I’m up on the numbers.”

We’ve all experienced that small gateway dose that leads to countless minutes spent on the phone. And we’ve all sat down on the toilet for a quick pee that somehow numbed our butts 45-minutes later. Whether you check the time, or get a weather update, or receive a typo-riddled text from your dad, any innocent diversion can lead to binge-watching a ton of zeroes and ones.

That’s why the sports watch, with its limited capabilities and 5 point IQ, is the smartest thing I’ve ever worn on my wrist. It tracks the time, never posts my degrading step-count to Facebook, and cannot possibly interrupt me without consent. And when I need to check the time, that interaction no longer pumps me with 20 CCs of digital dopamine.