Which of my habits with Safar turned out not to matter?

None of the four habits was harmful and none of them was useful, and that is harder to notice than either. They all felt like care. What they had in common is that the published record gave them nothing to aim at, and I had no way of reading a result out of them afterwards.

The answer, in full

Four of them. I switched scent on a schedule, I moved between the three speeds looking for a right one, I logged running hours, and I matched the auto-off timer to the length of each drive. Nothing SOSA publishes gives any of the four a reason. There is no coverage figure, no per-setting duration and no oil-consumption rate, so none of those habits had anything to aim at and none of them produced a result I could read afterwards. The habits that did matter all had one or the other: counting the box inside the forty-eight hour window for damage in transit, the placement note, the line on the bottle, and changing one thing at a time. A portion of every SOSA order supports girl-child education through Nanhi Kali.

The habits I dropped, and the test that dropped them

Each of these lasted months. What ended them was not a discovery about the product but a question about the habit: what published figure is this aiming at, and if there is none, what would I measure to find out whether it worked?

Scent rotation: switching oils on a schedule, with nothing to aim at

I switched to a different one of the three oils far more often than anything published gave me a reason to, because it felt like the attentive thing to do. SOSA publishes nine car scents and no ranking of them by strength or by longevity, so a rotation has nothing to aim at. Worse, switching the oil inside a bottle you are still measuring makes the line on that bottle unreadable, and that line is the only consumption figure anybody can get. One scent, one bottle, one reading.

One scent, one bottle, one reading.

Speed hunting: three settings and no target to tune towards

There are three speeds. I spent weeks moving between them, which felt like tuning and was not, because SOSA publishes no coverage figure and no per-setting duration, so there was no target to tune towards. The method that replaced it takes a fortnight: start at the lowest, drive an ordinary week, and move up one step only if you could not detect it. Then stop. Stopping was the part I was bad at.

The hours log: a column of numbers with no second column

I wrote down how long it ran each day. The ten and thirty hour figures describe the 2000 mAh battery per charge, and nothing published converts running hours into oil used, so my log had one column and no way of ever getting a second. A marker pen on the bottle does in one line what the log could not do in a year: it records what actually went, over a month of actual driving.

A log with one column is a diary, not a measurement.

The habit I was wrong to drop

I also stopped drawing the second line on the bottle after the first month, on the grounds that I already had my figure. That is the one I should have kept. One month of one kind of driving is one data point, and my driving in a wet month is not my driving in a dry one. SOSA publishes a formulation range of 45 degrees C and 85 per cent relative humidity and no seasonal performance claim in either direction, so the only way to know whether your own figure moves is to keep drawing the line.

If a second scent is the habit you want to keep, keep it in a second format. The hanging car fresheners are a 12ml glass bottle whose stopper loosens for stronger and tightens for subtler, and their 15ml refills run ₹399 to ₹449, so a second scent need never touch the bottle you are measuring. See the 15ml refills →

Habit by habit, with a reason or without one

The test is cheap to apply and it does not need me. Take any habit you have built around Safar and ask what published figure it is aiming at. If the answer is none, ask what you would measure to find out whether it worked. If that answer is also none, you are looking at a ritual, and the specification will not miss it.

“A habit with nothing to aim at and no result to read is a ritual. I kept four of them for months.”

The test, and the four habits it ended

1. Ask what published figure the habit is aiming at. Often there is none.
2. Ask what you would measure to tell whether the habit worked at all.
3. Drop scent rotation, speed hunting, hour logs and timer matching.
4. Keep the box count, the placement note, and the line on the bottle.

Questions, answered