Habits from the room around you · habit 40 of 40

Walking away from it

The kettle boils. The door goes. Somebody calls from the other room. The screen stays exactly as it was, because home is not the kind of place where anybody locks anything.

The habit

Standing up without locking the screen, because at home there has never been a reason to.

Why it is automatic

Locking is something work made people do, and people resented it: a timeout that fired during a phone call, a password typed forty times a day, a policy nobody asked for. When the same person gets home, the absence of all that is one of the pleasures of the place. The lock keystroke exists on every system and most people at home have never pressed it deliberately.

Machines are also configured against it. Sleep gets turned off because sleep interrupted a download, paused music, dropped a connection or ruined an overnight transfer. Somebody changed that setting once for a good reason and it has been the setting ever since, so the display now stays on until it is told otherwise.

There is a social layer as well. Locking a screen in front of housemates or family reads as a statement about them, which is the last thing anybody wants it to be. The habit is not simply laziness. It is partly a courtesy, and courtesies are harder to change than settings.

What it actually does here

Other people use the machine, and that is what it is for. A child doing homework, a partner checking a balance, a guest printing a boarding pass. The reasonable first move for all of them is to open the browser, and whatever was left open is what they see. Nothing in that sequence involves anybody looking for anything.

A window that is minimised rather than closed comes back exactly as it was. So does a browser reopened after a restart on most setups, since restoring the previous session is the default and it is a genuinely useful default. The page does not have to be found. It is still there, in the state it was in when you got up.

A screen that never sleeps also keeps pointing at the room, which is the mechanism in the page on where the screen points. The two habits stack: a page aimed at a doorway is one thing while you sit in front of it and a different thing for the hour you are downstairs.

Then there is the difference between a blank screen and a locked one. A screensaver, a dimmed display, a closed lid: none of those necessarily requires a password to get back in, and on many machines none of them does by default. The screen goes dark, the session stays open, and moving the mouse restores everything.

The machine is not only yours

Most home machines are shared even when they are described as personal. There is the person who owns it, the people who borrow it, and the people who would never dream of touching it until the day they need to print something and nobody else is home.

Sharing is not the problem and does not need solving. What needs handling is the gap between how a machine is described and how it is used, because that gap is where an open session sits. A laptop called mine that four people have opened this month is a shared machine with a misleading name, and the same mismatch appears from the other direction on a work machine used at home.

Sleep, lock and the difference between them

These words get used as though they meant the same thing. Sleep is a power state. A screensaver is a picture. A lock is the only one of the three that asks for a password before it gives the session back, and it is the only one that helps here.

On most systems the useful settings sit together: a short idle time before the display turns off, and a switch that requires a password on waking. The second one is the one that matters and it is frequently off. Setting both takes less time than reading this paragraph, and after that the machine handles the evenings you forget.

What to do instead

The target is a reflex attached to standing up, in the way that locking a front door is attached to leaving a house.

1. Learn the lock keystroke for your own system and use it every time you leave the chair, including the short absences, which are most of them.
2. Turn on the setting that requires a password when the display wakes, since without it a dark screen is only a dark screen.
3. Set a short idle timeout for the display and accept that it will occasionally annoy you, because that is what tells you it works.
4. Close the market window rather than minimising it. A minimised window returns on the same page, and so does a restored session after a restart.
5. If locking would be conspicuous in your household, set the timeout so the machine does it for you and nobody has to watch you do it.

How to notice you did it anyway

The evidence of an open session is mostly a matter of timing, and timing is one of the few things a machine records unasked.

• Whether the browser reopens on the page you last had up, which is what somebody else would have seen after a restart.
• History or tabs with activity at times you were not at the desk, since an open session is one anybody can add to.
• Whether the screen is still lit when you come back from a long errand, which answers directly whether it ever sleeps.
• Notifications that arrived while you were away and sat on the screen the whole time, in a room you were not in.
• Anybody in the house mentioning something they saw on it, which is almost always a window that was still open.

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