The Cost of Checking, Measured

I have written that checking frequently produces no information and I had never actually measured it on myself. So I did.

The method

For one month, every time I looked at a price, I recorded the time, the reason I looked, and what I did as a result.

At the end of the month I scored each entry: did this check produce a decision, and was that decision better than not having checked.

The results

Thirty-one checks over thirty days, which is already far more than my stated schedule of once monthly.

Of those, twenty-four produced nothing. I looked, noted the number, and closed the application.

Four produced an impulse I did not act on. All four would have been worse than doing nothing, priced at the end of the month.

Two produced research: I looked something up because a move was unusual. Both turned out to be ordinary volatility with no explanation worth finding.

One produced a legitimate action: a scheduled quarterly rebalance that happened to fall in that month.

So: one useful check out of thirty-one, and that one was scheduled rather than prompted by looking.

What the reasons column showed

“Curiosity” appeared nineteen times. Which is honest and which is the same thing as habit.

“Something in the news” appeared six times. In five of those, the news was not about anything I hold.

“Someone mentioned it” appeared four times.

“Scheduled review” appeared once.

Thirty of thirty-one checks were prompted by something external rather than by any need of mine.

The time cost

I did not record duration and I estimate two to four minutes each including the tail of attention afterwards.

Call it ninety minutes over a month. That is not enormous and it is also not nothing, and it bought exactly one scheduled action that would have happened anyway.

The part that is not time

Four impulses. All four felt like conclusions at the time. All four would have cost money.

None of them would have existed without the check. That is the actual cost: not the minutes, but the manufacture of four decisions out of nothing.

What I changed afterwards

The application is off my phone again. It had crept back on.

I moved the quarterly review to a calendar entry rather than leaving it to when I remember, because the one useful check was the scheduled one and everything else was noise.

And I stopped reading the two market-focused sources I had been following, keeping only the ones that write about mechanisms.

The finding I did not expect

The checking was not driven by anxiety about my position. It was driven by external prompts, which means it is an environment problem rather than a psychology problem.

Environment problems are considerably easier to fix. The standing order at a platform I can leave a standing order on continues regardless, and with the application removed there is nothing to open when someone at work mentions a price move.