Checking once, properly

The first practical step is to make the once worth trusting. Most of the checking research points here. A check done with attention makes a vivid memory. A check done on autopilot makes a thin one, and a thin one is what invites the recheck. Everything in this chapter is my own method, built on the research earlier in the book.

Slow down at the moment. The door, the hob, the straighteners, the send button. For each, stop for two seconds. Not to worry. To look.

Use the senses, on purpose. Look at the lock. Feel the key turn. Listen for the click. Van den Hout and Kindt's account is that vividness comes from perceptual detail, and the details are only there to be stored if you attend to them. On the first check, you're gathering exactly what the recheck will later go looking for and fail to find.

Say it aloud, with the time. "Door locked, twenty past eight." "Hob off, all four." "Straighteners off, unplugged." Speaking it does two things. It makes the check an event with a sound in it, which is more memorable than a silent one. And it gives you a sentence to hand the doubt later. When the doubt arrives at the lights, you don't reach for a picture, which will have faded. You reach for the sentence, which won't.

Do it once, at the right moment. The right moment is when you're doing the thing. Locking the door is the check of the door. Turning off the hob is the check of the hob. Reading the email before sending is the check of the email. There's no separate checking stage. The act, done with attention, is the check.

Then leave. Walk to the car without looking back. This isn't a rule against looking back for the sake of it. It's that the once is complete, and anything after it starts the fade.

If you didn't do the once, go back and do it. This is the one exception, and it's important. If you get to the car and realise that you locked the door while on the phone and have no sentence and no picture, that's not doubt. That's a missing check. Go back, do the once properly, say the sentence, and then leave. The rule is one attentive check, not zero.

Keep the tally going. Each time you do the once and leave, make a mark. Each time you go back, make a different mark. Over a fortnight you'll see the first column grow and the second shrink, and you'll have a record of how many times the once was enough, which will be all of them.

The point of all this is to give you something to stand on. The recheck has been the thing you stood on, and it turned out to be sand. The once, done well, is rock. It's the same check everyone should do, done deliberately by someone who has decided that it's the last one.