How Would You Know?

Someone asked me recently whether a small practice I keep is actually doing anything for me, and I said yes without hesitating. Afterwards I found I couldn't say why. What was underneath the answer was a sort of general impression that things had been better lately — and a general impression, I've since decided, is not quite the same as knowing.

It's stayed with me, because it's the way I've assessed nearly everything I do. Not carelessly. Just by feel, which seems reasonable until you look at it directly.

And I don't think I ever chose it, exactly. Nobody sits down and decides to judge their life by feel. It's just what you're left with when you haven't put anything else in place — which means it doesn't feel like a method at all. It feels like simply knowing how things are going.

And I'd have defended it, too, if someone had pressed. I'd have found reasons — I'm reasonably good at finding reasons. But they'd have been assembled afterwards to support something I'd already settled on a feeling, which isn't the same as having thought it through. That's the part that stayed with me: not that I didn't know, but that I could have carried on not knowing for years and sounded quite thoughtful throughout.

The trouble isn't that feelings are unreliable. It's that they're answering a slightly different question than the one being asked.

Think about what shapes how you feel about a week by Thursday. Whether you slept. Whether a conversation went badly. Whether something arrived unexpectedly. Whether one particular person was short with you. All of that is real, and none of it says anything about whether the small practice you've been keeping is helping. It describes the week. It doesn't describe the practice.

You can try this yourself in about a minute. Think of a stretch you'd call a good one, and then see if you can say what was actually working. What most of us come up with is something about how it felt — lighter, steadier, more like ourselves. Which is a lovely description of the experience and tells you nothing at all about what produced it.

There's a timing problem too. Something that's helping tends to show up in how you feel a good while after it started helping, and something that's quietly not working feels perfectly fine until it doesn't. By the time the feeling arrives, it's reporting on a stretch that's already behind you.

Which means you're always a little behind, adjusting to a version of things that has already moved on. It's the reason we tend to swing — abandoning something just as it was starting to help, or holding on to something well past the point it stopped. Neither is impatience. It's just what happens when the signal you're steering by is describing last month.

The first is letting go of something that was working, because a hard week happened while it was running. The hardness had nothing to do with it — but it was there, so it takes the blame. I've done this more than once, and each time I was quite sure at the moment I did it.

There's a knock-on effect I didn't expect, either. Do that three or four times and you start to think of yourself as someone who can't stick with anything. That belief is unkind and it isn't accurate, but it settles in quietly and makes the next thing harder to begin. It was never about follow-through. It was about judging the arrangement by the weather it happened to be running in.

The second is gentler and probably more common: keeping something that isn't doing much, because doing it feels like taking care of yourself. Some practices give a lovely sense of being on top of things and not a great deal else. And because that sense is exactly what a genuinely useful practice feels like, there's no way to tell them apart from the inside.

What I've started doing is almost embarrassingly simple. I picked three things I can actually see — not feel — and I glance at them once a week. It takes about a minute and a half.

I keep it on the same page I already use, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Anything that needs opening something else, or remembering where I put it, is a thing I will stop doing by the third week — not out of laziness exactly, just because a busy Tuesday will always find the weakest link in a habit and pull on it.

The difference is that they're observable. Did the walk happen, or didn't it. Did I get to the end of the week with anything left over. These are just facts about what occurred. They don't shift depending on my mood on Wednesday, and I don't get to have an opinion about them, which is the entire point.

There's something quietly freeing about that, actually. A fact doesn't require me to have a view. On a week where I feel I've done nothing at all, the page might show that most of it happened anyway — and that's not reassurance, which I'd have discounted. It's just what occurred, and it doesn't much care how I feel about it.

It isn't tracking, exactly. I've tried tracking and abandoned all of it — it becomes a small chore producing information nobody looks at. This is three things, glanced at, and then I get on with my life.

The smallness really is the whole thing. My first instinct was to pick eight, because eight felt thorough — and thoroughness is exactly what killed every previous attempt. Eight is a chore. Three is a glance. Anything that takes more than a couple of minutes has never once survived a full week in my life, however good my intentions were at the start.

Both surprises went in directions I didn't expect.

I'd braced for something else, if I'm honest. I assumed the record would mostly tell me I was doing less than I imagined, and that the whole exercise would end up being a rather dispiriting exercise in being told off by a piece of paper. That isn't how it went, which is worth saying, because I think the fear of what you'll find is the main reason people don't look.

Something I'd have described as central to my week turned out to be happening about a third of the time. I'd been counting meaning to do it as doing it, quietly, for months. And something I'd nearly let go of during a busy stretch — because it seemed like the least important thing on the list — turned out to line up almost exactly with the weeks that went well.

Which I'd genuinely have argued about, if someone had told me beforehand. That's the bit that still catches me slightly — not being wrong, but how settled the wrongness felt from inside. There was no wobble in it at all.

That second one is what stays with me. I came very close to giving away the thing that was helping most, on the strength of a passing feeling that it didn't matter much.

I've wondered since why the small things get miscategorised so reliably, and I think it's because we judge importance by how something feels to do. The effortful practices feel significant, so they get the credit. The four-minute one that produces no sense of achievement at all gets filed as trivial — and stays filed that way, because nothing in an ordinary life ever puts the two side by side.

So if there's something you keep — a practice, a rhythm, a small rule you set for yourself — the question I'd offer isn't whether it's working. It's how you'd know if it stopped.

If the answer is that you'd probably notice, I'd say gently that you might not, or you'd notice long after it mattered, and you'd likely blame something else when you did. That isn't about you being unobservant. It's about what feelings are for, which is telling you about now — and what they're not for, which is telling you how something has been going across a season.

They're rather good at that, incidentally. I don't want to be down on feelings — they're the right instrument for a great many things, including most of what matters. They're simply the wrong one for this particular question, in the way a lovely watch is the wrong tool for measuring a room. Nothing is wrong with the watch.

Pick two or three things you can see rather than sense. Look at them on Sundays. Let them be dull. What you're hoping to find is the one place where what you noticed and what actually happened don't quite match — because that small difference is the only genuinely new thing in the whole exercise, and there isn't another way to come by it.

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