As somebody with ADHD who has serious difficulty with time management, staying focused and on-track, this device sounded like a life saver. Unfortunately, it has some major flaws that make it extremely ADHD unfriendly. I'm really disappointed. After trying it for 4 weeks, I'm returning it.
The vibration is very quiet and is a very useful feature. There are two types of alerts you can set: training and reminders. The only thing I've successfully programmed is a training alert..."relax". It goes off every hour during the times I'm awake (you can set whatever times you want and make it recur at various intervals....such as 15 or 30 minutes or random intervals). Once it was set, it repeats daily without further programming of that particular reminder (unless you want to change something). "Relax" had been helpful for 2 reasons; I use it to check in and see if my body is relaxed (it never is)...to take a deep breath and intentionally relax my shoulders. It's very grounding...before using this, I might only think to do this every few days or weeks. The second benefit is that it lets me know how long an hour is. That may sound silly, but if you have ADHD you probably already know that there is a tendency to have an elastic sense of time, which causes a lot of problems.
My major issues with the Watchminder:
-setting it is very frustrating and confusing. I'll try to keep this as simple as possible, so I have to omit a lot of details. I'm pretty good with tech things, so I was hoping I wouldn't have too hard of a time with it. Unfortunately, other than "relax", I've gotten too frustrated every time I've tried to set it and after 20 minutes or more, I've always given up. When it first arrived, I spent a few hours reading the manual and trying to figure out how everything works. It isn't an intuitive program and is inconsistent. A button that you need to program one thing, pushed while trying to do another thing will bring you back to the main watch screen, undoing what you were trying to do.
You can add short customized reminders, but you have to program them in by scrolling through the letters one-by-one and there apparently is no "back", so if you make a mistake and choose the wrong letter (which is very easy to do), you have to figure out how to delete the entire entry (another confusing task) and begin all over again. There are only 5 buttons, one of which is just for the backlight.
-the instruction booklet does not make things very clear. There is a lot of "press this, go back to pages 12-14 and do steps 2-8 for such-and-such, then press this and this", so you end up flipping back and forth in the tiny manual, trying to follow the directions.
-it is heavy, bulky, and hard plastic. As a petite adult, it looks absurd. That I could deal with, but the plastic bothers me a lot. The company clearly didn't take into consideration the fact that many people with ADHD have hypersensitivity sensory issues (to fabrics and such, to sounds, etc.) and will have trouble trying to wear something uncomfortable all of the time.
-the backlight only stays lit for a few moments...not nearly long enough to program anything.
-the stopwatch and timer are useful. But, if one of your alerts comes up while using the stopwatch, it takes priority and the stopwatch turns off completely as if it was never on.
If it was as effective a tool as I'd hoped, it would have been worth the high cost. But, considering it's short-comings and the quality of the material used, it is WAY overpriced.