bhagolblog

Decisions · The gist

Checking the calendar too often

Opening a calendar or astrology app 40 times a day is not a silly habit, it is a habit that works, and the essay sets out what it works at, why the relief keeps shrinking, and how to interrupt it without giving anything up.

The essay8 minThe gist2 min

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

Checking something over and over does not make you surer of what you saw. In a laboratory study, people who checked repeatedly remembered just as accurately, but trusted their own memory less. So the checking supplies its own reason to check again.

Start with a number. An app opened 41 times in one day. Four of those openings changed something: a drive was timed, a call was moved, a form went in early, a fast day was looked up for somebody's mother. The other 37 changed nothing. The number is a composite, not a reading off anybody's real phone.

One of those 37 takes about three seconds. A small pressure arrives, usually attached to something unsettled. The thumb opens the app. The pressure goes down a little.

That is not foolish. It works. A calendar is an instrument for making a piece of the future knowable in advance. The trouble is what the piece stands in for. You cannot get an answer about whether last April was a mistake, or whether your mother's cough is nothing. You can get one about Thursday afternoon, instantly, free. The available answer takes the place of the one you actually wanted.

Then the piece gets smaller. A look used to cover a month, then a week, then today, then the next ninety minutes. A month lasts you a month. Ninety minutes lasts ninety minutes, so you need another look.

Two other things keep it running. Most looks give you nothing and a few feel like a find, and rewards that arrive unpredictably build far more stubborn habits than reliable ones. And repeated checking blurs your memory of what you checked, which makes looking again feel necessary.

The essay's test is one word long. When you look, does the answer change where something goes, or whether it happens? Where is planning: the thing still happens, you were only choosing its place. Whether means you had nothing to place, only a feeling, and you came back holding a verdict on it.

Three interruptions follow. One fixed sitting a day, when everything gets asked at once. One week of writing each check beside what you actually did differently. And copying the two or three timings that matter onto paper, then shutting the phone, because paper cannot be asked again.

Words decoded

panchang (पञ्चाङ्ग, pañcāṅga)
the Indian daily almanac sheet, which sets out five things about each day and is where most people look up timings
transit, or gochara (गोचर, gocara)
where a planet stands in the sky today, read against where it stood on the day you were born
period
a named stretch of months or years that this system says you are in, worked out by arithmetic rather than intuition
decision journal
a few lines written before and after a reading, so that a year later you can see what was actually said and what you actually did
reward schedule
the pattern in which a reward arrives; laboratory work going back to the 1950s shows that rewards arriving unpredictably produce the most persistent habits
calendarium
the Latin word behind our word "calendar", meaning an account book, named after the day of the Roman month when debts fell due
Why anyone should careNobody decides to check something 40 times a day. The habit builds itself out of small moments of relief that are real, which is why arguing yourself out of it does not work. Seeing what the checking is buying, and putting one fixed window in the day, costs nothing and settles nothing about whether astrology is true.
Read it properly, 8 min Checking the calendar too often