Afterwards

The check afterwards

You will do it anyway. Everybody does. The useful skill is not perfect restraint, it is knowing where to look a week later and finding out what happened.

Advice about habits usually stops at the point of change, as though the reader will read a paragraph and then never slip. That is not how any of it works. Reflexes come back under fatigue, under pressure, under a deadline, and on the evening when you are doing three things at once. Assuming otherwise produces advice that fails silently, because a person who slipped and did not notice believes they are still following it.

So every page on this site ends with the same thing: somewhere to look afterwards. Those checks are gathered here, one row per habit, because most of them are quicker to run as a batch than one at a time. Going through the whole table takes a quiet half hour and is worth doing once, before you have any particular reason to.

How to run this

Four passes, in this order

The order runs from the checks that need nothing to the ones that need you to go and find something.

1Start with the lists that are already on your screen
Browser history, saved passwords, saved form entries, downloads, bookmarks, open tabs. These take a couple of minutes each and they are the ones that most often turn up something the reader did not know was there.
2Then the things that sync
Photo libraries, notes apps, clipboard history, anything with the word cloud attached to it. Look for the copy rather than the original. The original is usually where you expect and the copy usually is not.
3Then the conversations
Messages you sent yourself, questions you asked, links you pasted. These are the checks people skip because they feel like reading old mail, and they are also the ones that turn up the most.
4Then the room
Paper, packaging, what a screen faces, what is still open on it. Nothing digital about this pass at all, and it is the one that takes the least time and gets done the least.

Every check on the site

One row per habit. The right hand column is where to look, and the page behind each link explains what you are looking for and what it means if you find it.

No	The habit	Where to look afterwards
01	The password manager fills it	The saved logins list in every browser profile you sign into
02	Letting the browser remember	Saved addresses and autofill entries on each profile you use
03	Restoring the tabs	The recently closed menu and the startup behaviour setting
04	Keeping it on the bookmark bar	The bookmark bar, the other bookmarks folder and the sync list
05	Typing the name in the bar	The address bar history and the search suggestions setting
06	Making the browser comfortable	The extensions list, the zoom level and the window dimensions
07	Translating the page	The translation settings, and any extension that offers the feature
08	Taking a screenshot to remember it	The recent items, the screenshots album, the deleted album
09	Letting the camera roll back itself up	The library on another machine and the deleted album
10	Banners over whatever is on the screen	Recent captures, lock screen previews, notification history
11	It opens in the app, not the browser	Browser history for an absence, and the app's own history
12	Letting the keyboard finish it	The suggestion strip, the keyboard list, the learned dictionary
13	The clipboard that remembers	The clipboard panel in the keyboard and the paste banners
14	I will just check it on my phone	Phone history, gallery, clipboard, suggestions, synced tabs
15	Looking for a sign in with button	The address of the page you finally registered on
16	Reusing the handle you always use	Put your own handle into a search box and read what comes back
17	The password shape you always use	List the passwords you can still type from memory
18	Typing an address into the recovery field	Read back what you actually put into every optional field
19	Keep me signed in	Open the site cold and see whether it already knows you
20	Assuming there is a reset	Try to produce the credential right now from where you keep it
21	Putting a reference on it	the note or message field on anything you filled in this week
22	Keeping the receipt	your screenshots folder and whatever backs it up without asking
23	Expecting somebody to refund it	who you contacted after the last thing that went wrong, and how you found them
24	The address that worked last time	every saved payee, note and clipboard entry holding an old destination
25	Checking it in the usual app	the activity or security history on the app you check things in
26	Sending yourself a note	Sent items, the drafts folder, and any notes app that syncs
27	Asking in the group	Your own posting history and the quoted replies underneath it
28	Pasting the link to someone	Sent messages, preview cards, and the threads you have left
29	Writing the way you always write	Two of your own messages from different places, side by side
30	Saying thanks with the details	Your own feedback, read back the way a stranger would read it
31	Using the laptop you also work on	the downloads folder, the sync icon and the browser profile menu
32	Using somebody else's network	the saved networks list, the portal page and the device name
33	A device somebody else administers	the profiles pane, the browser management page and the tray icon
34	Printing it out	the print queue, the printer job history and the output tray
35	Wherever it saves by default	the full path in the title bar and the sync client activity list
36	The screen facing the room	sit in every other seat in the room, and in the doorway, and look up
37	Saying it out loud	the voice activity history on every account that has a microphone
38	Writing it on paper	the drawer, the notebook, the pocket and the recycling
39	The packaging afterwards	the hallway, the recycling stack and photographs taken that week
40	Walking away from it	the tabs and history from the times you were not at the desk

What to do when a check turns something up

Usually nothing dramatic. Most of the time the answer is to delete the thing, turn off whatever produced it, and move on. Occasionally the answer is that the thing cannot be deleted, because a copy left the machine some time ago, and in that case the useful response is to stop producing more of them rather than to spend the evening on the one you found.

What is not useful is treating a discovery as a crisis. A found artifact is a piece of information, and information is the thing you were short of five minutes ago. The reader who has looked and found three things is in a straightforwardly better position than the reader who has not looked, even though it does not feel that way in the moment.

It is also worth writing down what you found, on paper, in a way that means nothing to anybody else, so that the next pass takes ten minutes instead of thirty. The trade offs around writing things on paper are on that page, and they cut both ways.

What readers ask about this group

How often should I do this?

Once properly, and then whenever something reminds you. A fixed schedule sounds sensible and gets abandoned in about three weeks. A single thorough pass that shows you where everything lives is worth more, because after that the individual checks take seconds and you will run them when they occur to you.

Is it not worse to go looking?

No. The artifacts exist whether or not you have looked at them, and the only thing not looking changes is your own estimate of the situation. An inaccurate estimate is what produces bad decisions later.

What if I find something I cannot remove?

That happens, usually with anything that synced somewhere before you got there. The realistic response is to stop the mechanism that produced it so that the count stops going up. There is no page on this site that can undo a copy that has already left a machine, and anybody claiming otherwise should be treated carefully.