I have a GPS bike computer primarily for following pre-planned routes , because it became a better supported option than our old paper cue sheets. One of the benefits of switching to from paper cue sheets to a GPS unit was better supported route following, but after I made the switch, I found that it was also less distracting than using paper cue sheets. On the surface this might sound paradoxical, since people often say that computer screens are more distracting. It's true that a GPS bike computer has a lot that you can look at, but for route following, a GPS bike computer also has features that let me not pay attention to it.

When I used paper cue sheets, I always had to pay a certain amount of attention to following the route. I needed to keep track of where we were on the cue sheet's route, and either remember what the next turn was or look at the cue sheet frequently enough that I could be sure I wouldn't miss it. I also needed to devote a certain amount of effort to scanning street signs to recognize the street we'd be turning on to. All of this distracted me from looking around and enjoying the ride; I could never check out completely from route following.

When I follow a route on my GPS bike computer, it's much easier to not pay attention to route following most of the time. My GPS bike computer will beep at me and display a turn alert when we get close to a turn, and I always have it display the distance to the next turn so I can take a quick glance to reassure myself that we're nowhere near the turn. If there's any ambiguity about where to turn, I can look at the route's trace on a map and see that the turn is, for example, two streets ahead, and of course the GPS bike computer is always keeping track of where in the route I am.

Because the GPS bike computer can tell me when I need to pay attention to following the route, I'm free to not pay attention at other times. I can stop thinking about the route at all and look around at the scenery, talk with my fellow club riders , and so on.

(When I look around there are similar situations at work, with some of our systems. Our metrics, monitoring, and alerting system often has the net effect that I don't even look at how things are going because I assume that silence means all is okay. And if I want to do the equivalent of glancing at my GPS bike computer to check the distance to the next turn, I can look at our dashboards.)