"It's only a quick look"

Each individual look is nothing. It takes thirty seconds at the kettle or a minute on the platform. You're hardly going to be harmed by a minute. This is what makes the habit hard to see, and it's the same for most habits in this series. No single instance is worth worrying about.

So do the arithmetic once. There were twenty-five looks on Monday. Some were thirty seconds, but the lunchtime one was twenty minutes and the evening bulletin was half an hour. A fair total is somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half a day. That's seven to ten hours a week, which is a working day, spent on something you don't enjoy and don't learn much from. Neil's weekend read takes two.

The time is the smaller cost, though. The larger one is what a look does to the minutes around it.

Each look is a small interruption to whatever you were doing or thinking. When you glance at the open tab between tasks at work, your attention doesn't return at once to where it was. Part of it stays with the headline for a while. If the headline carried a jolt, more of it stays. A day with twenty-five such interruptions in it is a day in which your attention is never quite whole.

Two of the looks deserve particular mention, because of when they happen.

The first is the one before you're out of bed. At ten past seven your mind is as calm as it'll be all day. It hasn't yet taken on the day's concerns. The first thing you give it is a missile strike, a stabbing, a scandal and a warning. You've chosen to begin the day with the jolt, and it sets your mood for the morning. It also sets the pattern, because a day that begins with checking tends to continue with it.

The second is the one last thing at night. Sleep comes most easily to a mind that's winding down. At eleven o'clock you give yours a final round of alarm to process in the dark. If you lie awake thinking about the winter and the economists, or wake at three with a vague sense of threat, the look in bed may be part of the reason.

Like the other habits in this series, the quick look runs on cues and not on decisions. The cues are the phone in your hand, a pause, a moment of boredom, the kettle, the platform, the advert break. You don't decide to check, any more than you decide to scratch an itch. That's good news in one respect, because cue-driven habits weaken quickly when the cues are changed. If the news app isn't on your home screen, the tab isn't open, and the phone isn't by the bed, most of the twenty-five looks won't occur to you. Chapter 15 makes use of that.