Habits from paying for things · habit 25 of 40

Checking it in the usual app

It is the same gesture as checking the weather. Open the app that is already on the home screen, read a number, close it again. The gesture is so small that most people would not describe it as doing anything at all.

The habit

You open the app you use for everything else, just to see the number.

Why it is automatic

The gesture was trained by design and refined for a decade. Balances moved to the top of the screen, then to the widget, then to the lock screen, then to a notification that arrives without being asked for. Every one of those changes shortened the distance between wondering and knowing, and shortening that distance was the explicit goal.

Curiosity finishes the training. A number that changes is a number people check, and checking it produces a small resolution each time, which is enough to build a loop. Anyone who has refreshed a delivery tracking page four times in an hour knows the feeling and knows perfectly well the refreshing did not move the van.

It is also genuinely free everywhere else. Nobody is billed for a balance check, nobody is inconvenienced by one, and no consequence follows from doing it eleven times in a day. That absence of cost is the reason the habit never had to be examined.

What it actually does here

The app has a history and you are not the only reader of it. Financial services keep access logs because they are required to and because they need them for fraud handling, so the pattern of when an account was opened and from where is retained by design. That log exists regardless of whether anything was moved.

A pattern of checks is more informative than a single check. Timing that clusters around particular events, at particular hours, from a particular network, is a shape. Nobody has to be interested in you for the shape to be recorded, because recording it is the default behaviour of the system rather than a response to anything you did.

The device layer keeps its own copy. On most phones an opened app appears in usage statistics, in the recent apps list, and in whatever backup runs overnight, and on a shared or work machine it may also appear in a management console. The room you were in when you looked is covered elsewhere on the site, and the point holds here: opening an app is an event with more than one witness.

What makes it worse than it needs to be is that the check accomplishes nothing. The number is not affected by observation. If value has moved, it has moved whether you look or not, and if it has not, looking does not hurry it along. Every one of these events is spent on information that changes no decision.

The one habit on this site with no cost to dropping it

Most retraining involves a trade. Turning off a convenience makes something slower. Writing a reference on paper rather than in a form means you have to find the paper. Fetching a fresh destination every time adds a step. Those trades are small and worth making, but they are real, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

This one has no trade at all. Not looking costs nothing whatsoever, because the act of looking never produced anything. There is no scenario in which the check was the thing that helped. That makes it, by a distance, the easiest habit on this site to break, and a sensible one to start with if you are going to change one thing this week.

The reason it survives anyway is that it never presents itself as a decision. Nobody decides to check. The phone is in the hand for another reason, the icon is there, and the gesture completes before any thought about it begins. What breaks it is making the icon harder to reach, not resolving to be disciplined.

Waiting is uncomfortable and the app is not the cure

Underneath the checking is waiting, and waiting for something you cannot influence is one of the more unpleasant states a person can be in. The habit is a way of doing something about it, and it works briefly, which is exactly why it repeats. Recognising it as a response to discomfort rather than a search for information is most of the work.

The practical substitute is to decide in advance when you will look and to let the interval do the waiting for you. Once a day, at a time you chose, is more information per look and far fewer events. If the interval feels intolerable, that is worth knowing on its own, and checking back makes the same argument about how often anything on this site is worth revisiting.

The habit also compounds with the one on keeping the receipt, because people who check often tend to capture what they saw while they are there. Two habits, one gesture, and the second one leaves the file.

What to do instead

Since nothing is lost by not looking, the whole fix is making the gesture inconvenient.

1. Move the app off the home screen and out of any dock, so opening it requires a search rather than a glance.
2. Turn off balance widgets, lock screen figures and push notifications, which are what make the check happen without being chosen.
3. Pick one time of day for looking if you must look, and let everything before it wait.
4. Do not check from a machine or network you do not control, and do not check because you are somewhere with a spare minute.
5. Keep whatever you use for this separate from the app you open all day for ordinary reasons.

How to notice you did it anyway

Both the app and the phone will tell you how often this happened, which most people find surprising.

• Open the account activity or security history in the app and read the list of recent sessions rather than the balance.
• Look at your phone usage statistics for that app and compare the number of opens with the number you would have guessed.
• Check whether a widget, complication or notification is showing a figure somewhere you did not intend it to be visible.
• Look at whether any of the checks happened on a network or a device belonging to somebody else.
• Notice what you were doing immediately before each check. The trigger is usually boredom or waiting rather than a question.

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