FEATURE: Keeping Track of Wrist Time 2021

WAZ101A.BT0724                 WF1112.BC0527                  CAF7013.FT8011

I made a conscious decision last year not to do a quarterly 'Keeping Track of Wrist Time' post. For one thing, I'm not sure it's that interesting for you the reader to keep up with what I'm wearing four times a year and also, I feel it's hard to quantify the relevance of it since the collection changes through the year as new pieces are added. So instead I decided that going forward I would just do one 'KTOWT' each year and this is it for 2021.

So right off the bat we can see that the runaway winner this year is my 2021 Watch of the Year, the orange dial quartz Formula 1. Obvious, right? Well, maybe... it is my newest 'new' watch after all, but I was still quite surprised at quite how dominant it was over the rest of the 'top ten'. 

Incidentally, this year I've had to break up the graph into three parts because the graph maker website I use only lets me put in fifty sets of data, and I have fifty two watches... but this is a good thing I think as it lets me analyse each section separately.

Perhaps more surprising was the number two spot taken by my white dial 4000 Series (purchased December 2020 incidentally), I guess this had the novelty of being able to wear a bracelet, and a choice of green or blue sharkskin straps, but even so this level of wear definitely surprised me.

The yellow Aquaracer has always been a strong part of my collection, so this doesn't really surprise me at all. I would be more surprised if it wasn't somewhere near the top to be honest, I really do love this watch and I will never sell it, in fact if I had to choose a top five watches I'm pretty sure this would be in it.

Obviously I don't want to go through every single watch but it does surprise me when I look at these charts what exactly gets worn and what doesn't. I'm sure there's definitely an element some days of 'this is beaten up anyway so it doesn't matter', but then like I am really surprised that my plain black F1 Classic is the most worn of those... with all those crazy colours to choose from this is the one that gets the most wrist time? I mean, it's cool and I like it, but really??? And the blue/black one, which is definitely not one of my favourite classic F1s, how did that get so much wrist time? Bizarre!

Anyway, let's move on to the next graph...

I think I made a deliberate decision part way through the year to wear the plum dial Kirium, because after buying it at the very tail end of 2020, I'm sure I was too scared to wear it because it was in such amazing condition. So with that in mind I'm pleased to see that it racked up a very respectable 'nine' wears in 2021. 

I'm a little surprised the Aquaracer 500M didn't accumulate more than nine wears, but I guess as the collection grows and grows then this will happen, I simply can't wear everything and actually, while I do often wear two watches a day, some days I don't wear one at all... so with that in mind '10' wears a year could be considered the 'average', so nine is pretty much spot on.

I might also have expected my steel 3000 Series to have featured higher up than this, especially as I have said on more than one occasion that it is perhaps my favourite watch of all. Of course, that changes on a daily basis, but it's certainly one of my absolute favourites. Maybe the novelty of the gold 3000 chrono arriving in January upset the scales there, perhaps it will come back strong in 2022?

And so finally we come to those watches that only got onto my wrist once every other month or even less in 2021... 

The first thing to say is that it pleases me to see that the only watch to score less than '3' is my new gold dial 2000 Series, a watch I haven't even talked about on the blog yet and one which has officially been designated a 2022 purchase, even though it arrived late December. 

Of the other watches at the lower end, the blue/red and blue/blue Formula 1 Classics are other recent acquisitions and the Executive, while in the collection for a few months now, was never going to be a regular on the wrist. It's very small and delicate and I feel it only really works when you can wear it under a cuff; it's too dressy to wear with a T-shirt and I simply don't wear a long sleeve that often, so I'm not surprised to see it right down at the bottom.

I am pleased to see the Microtimer get a reasonable amount of time on the wrist, I think it only managed three wears last year so that is on the up. By contrast the Link Searacer has not had a great year, but this might be because I have put on weight and I have no spare links for this and there is no adjustment on the clasp!

So I guess the inevitable question that arises when looking at this kind of data is... 'Do I have too many watches?'. Well, I guess I could see why a reasonable person might think that, but... I think here is where the distinction between 'owner' and 'collector' comes into play. See, I bought the Executive mindful that I may never actually wear it. To me it was a piece of the 'collection' not something that I wanted to necessarily wear and to me there is nothing odd about that.

Sure, you often see where people post on watch forums that they have moved watches on because they don't wear them, and I can totally understand that. But for me, as a 'historian' of sorts, having a 'representative' collection is more important than actually wearing everything. 

I think also, there's a tendency if you go down the 'accepted' route of accumulating/selling watches that each time you do that you want to move up a tier. So you collect maybe ten watches, then pare it down to 5, but then you start to buy more expensive watches and then the cycle spirals up that way. For me, the value of the watches isn't really the thing I'm bothered about, I'd really like at least one of every TAG Heuer model made, although obviously the cheapest Monacos and Grand Carreras are still quite expensive, but that's the (very) long term goal.