Mid last year, I noticed a few anomalies on my credit card statement so, with a quick call to the bank, I cancelled my card. Indeed, it turned out that I was the victim of some clever fraudsters trying to make inconsequential transactions on my card of small amounts like $26 with the detail section showing “Amazone” or “Netflixx” to make it seem legit. Given a subscribe to both services, I could have easily missed it. Once I’d gone ahead and cancelled my card I knew I had to go through the painstaking process of changing all of the automatic payments that I had set-up on the card. With all the best intentions in the world, I completely forgot about it.

Strangely, I didn’t hear anything from anyone in the first month. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my subconscious, I knew something was up but that’s when I started getting the communications. Services that I didn’t even know I was paying for, starting getting cut-off, subscriptions faulted, insurance companies ‘warned’ me of my impending doom! The most alarming thing to me was the sheer number of automatic payments that I’d accrued over the years. It turned out that the sudden disruption caused by some sneaky fraudsters was a total blessing. Their foul play alerted me to all the things I couldn’t see…the things were ticking away in the background unconsciously transacting, not delivering any value.

The beauty of disruption

Disruption causes us to re-evaluate what’s most important, like a quarterly clean-out of the fridge. There is likely some bad food in there that’s causing the whole kitchen to stink. Taking everything out enables you to consciously determine what goes back in. That’s exactly what happened with my automatic credit card payments. I gave them a good clean-out and got rid of that ‘bad smells’ so to speak.

The curse of habit

Habits are both our best friend and our worst enemy. In James Clear’s Atomic Habits, he describes a habit as behaviour that has been repeated enough times that it becomes automatic. The concept of not having to think about something is so incredibly seductive that when we are offered the automatic payment option, we jump at it. It ultimately appeals to our laziness which is easily justified by most people prescribing the ‘crazy busy’ label. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for learning about how to build great habits and break bad ones, I’m just a little concerned that our brains are so biased toward automaticity that it’s easier to just leave things on autopilot. This is particularly true when we hold beliefs about what we ‘should’ be doing or what ‘can’t’ be done.

Conscious vs Automatic processing

Something that I’ve learned following the whole credit card debacle is that not everything deserves to be in the automatic bucket, especially some of the smaller inconspicuous payments. Some of the bigger ticket items like a mortgage or car repayment certainly deserve to be processed automatically due to the value they create. I believe the danger lies in the many smaller ‘purchases’ we make that cumulatively, become quite costly. This doesn’t only apply to our direct debit payments but also behaviours that we perpetuate in our lives. Alcohol consumption, Smoking, diet, exercise, self-development, socialisation. All of them can play a part in our lives if we choose, my argument is to make sure you choose wisely before putting them in the automatic processing bucket.

Choosing wisely

Using the categories below, I want you to categorise all of the ‘things’ that you currently spend your time or your money on. Automatic ‘things’ can be payments, or time you spend with loved ones, or colleagues, or associates. Equally, what you deem as high value could be time by yourself or spending a huge amount of money on a luxurious holiday. It is up to you how to allocate where each of your ‘things’ fits.

Once you’ve completed the exercise, you’ll see a clear pattern concerning what you categorise as conscious vs automatic and what you see as high value vs low value. If you can see that there is one quadrant that seems a little bloated (it’s most likely going to be the Automatic Low-Value quadrant), then you know where you need to make some changes.

Don’t overthink this one, it’s not meant to be a mind-bender, but it is meant to be a quick and simple way to help you rebuild yourself and your life after some significant disruption. After all, we all have an opportunity to capitalise on the disruption we are currently facing and make conscious choices about how we rebuild our lives moving forward.