Not a discipline experiment. I just got busy, noticed on Thursday that I hadn’t opened the app since Sunday, and decided to see how long I could keep it going.

Answer: eleven days, and then I looked, and the number was a number.

The first two days were loud

I hadn’t understood how automatic the check had become. Kettle boiling, phone out. Standing in a queue, phone out. Waking at night, phone out. It’s not really about the money at that frequency. Nothing meaningful happens to a position in the ninety seconds between two glances. It’s a slot machine with a portfolio-shaped skin on it.

The standard argument against context switching goes like this: every time you jump between tasks, your brain needs time to reload the previous context. Studies cite 20-minute recovery windows. The implication is that fragmented schedules are inefficient, and deep work blocks are the fix.

This is true but incomplete. The more damaging cost of context switching is not the reload time. It is what happens to the task you interrupted.