Before subscribing to another trial of a new service, put in place your own “subscription maintenance system,” a practical set of steps you follow every time you subscribe.

1. Corporate survey research shows most of us have more than 4 subscription services, and that’s just taking entertainment into account.
2. You’ll never stop facing subscription choices in your life. The real choice is in how prepared you are to manage them.
3. Many people surveyed report the pain of having no centralized way to control their subscriptions. That’s intentional, and it’s called sludge.
4. Subscription sludge isn’t going away. Having a subscription maintenance checklist can help you set yourself up to make subscriptions easier.

Since so many services have moved to a subscription model over the past few years, there are now a number of examples:

1. Subscriptions with a free trial that require a credit card upfront and can’t be canceled until the pay period is ending, like Netflix, Spotify, or Hulu.
2. Subscriptions paid for via a digital app store like Apple’s App Store, Google Play, or Microsoft Store (e.g., fitness and gaming apps).
3. Subscriptions that you want for a limited period but don’t have a free trial, so you need to remember to cancel. Productivity tools like Adobe Photoshop or Final Cut Pro are common examples.
4. Subscriptions that you plan to use on an ongoing basis but want to revisit at least once per year, like Amazon Prime or a Costco membership.
5. Recurring payments that add up over time, such as newsletter subscriptions, Patreon support, or recurring donations.

Subscriptions exemplify the problems of life admin. They cost us time, money, and effort to manage. They’re designed for the fact that we all have limited attention, and the more we have, the less equipped we are to handle them.

It’s not unusual for highly competent, high-achieving people to find out that they’ve been paying for a subscription for the last six months that they don’t use. (I’ve done it!)

Over the last 20 years, the consumer world has transformed into a world of subscriptions, with more and more services moving into the cloud.

• Instead of cable, we’ve got a collection of streaming services.
• Instead of Microsoft Office pre-installed, we’ve got an annual software license.
• Instead of ad-supported news, we’ve got paywalls and monthly subscription fees.

As with so many transformations in technology, a new kind of work gets added to our life admin pile: managing subscriptions.

Now for the practical stuff: possible solutions to your subscription management headache.

I describe this as a “subscription maintenance system,” but as you’ll see, there are multiple pieces and parts, and you may only need some of them. As with everything here on Wayshaping, it’s up to you to shape your way.

Your subscription maintenance system may look different from mine, and that’s perfect.

In short, a subscription maintenance system is made up of:

• A checklist to use every time you’re starting a subscription
• Tech setups that will help you use the checklist (and which can support other parts of life admin)
• Events to schedule so that you know when to check back in with yourself

Upfront effort for long-term savings

A common theme across Wayshaping is that many ways to save on life admin time involve putting in a little bit more work upfront. Subscriptions are one of those situations. The checklist I’m going to describe asks you to make subscribing a matter of minutes instead of seconds. Similarly, giving yourself the right setup and scheduling events into the future takes time too. But compare that to time spent on the phone trying to recoup costs from a canceled subscription, and it’s well worth it.

Checklist: Subscribing with intentionality

Subscribing can easily be a fairly mindless task. I wanted to watch the Olympics, so I subscribed to Peacock. Not a complex decision. This checklist asks you to do just three extra things before you enter your credit card and hit “Subscribe.”

1. Add the subscription to your Subscription List.

This is just a list of all your subscriptions that you keep for yourself and your household.

• If you don’t have one yet, don’t let that stop you. Start a lightweight subscription list right then in a document, spreadsheet, or notebook—whatever you prefer. The key is just to get it down somewhere (you can clean it up later). You can even use my templates. Doc version » | Spreadsheet version »
• Add the following details:
  • Provider
  • Product/Service (if different from the provider)
  • Subscription level
  • Cost
  • Date of first charge (whether now or after trial)
  • Pay period
  • Cost
• If you already have a Subscription List, just add this new one as a line item.

2. Add the first day you’ll be charged to your calendar, whether printed or electronic.

Then, add an event for the day before telling yourself: “Cancel or Confirm _____ Subscription.”

• This step is easiest if you use an electronic calendaring tool, like Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple Calendar. But it works for a printed calendar too.
• The purpose is to give yourself two key moments: the moment the consequence of doing nothing kicks in, and the moment before that when you decide to do something.

3. Add an alert to send you an email or push notification to remind you to cancel.

This is a natural part of the previous checklist item if you use a digital calendar. When you’re setting or modifying a calendar event, you set an alert to show up via email, text, or push.

• Google Calendar event alert instructions
• Apple Calendar event alert instructions‍
• Outlook Calendar event alert instructions

Another option, if you don’t want to use Calendaring for alerts, is to use a to-do list tool like Google Tasks or Asana.

4. Add social accountability: your partner if you have one, or a close friend.

• Even with a reminder and alert, it’s easy to pass it by and forget. Maybe the alert goes off when you’re at a dinner party and you forget about it. Maybe you need more time to think about whether you’re going to cancel or not.
• Having a partner or friend remind you is a great backup. If you want to stay accountable to yourself, sometimes it’s helpful to have the social aspect of somebody asking, “Hey, by the way, did you cancel that subscription you alerted me to?”
• Check out more about why it’s not worth it to go about life admin completely solo.

Setting yourself up right with tech

As you can probably tell from the Checklist, some items are easier when enabled by some technology habits. When it comes to subscription maintenance—but really life admin more broadly—there are definitely ways that calendaring, to-do lists, and alerts can make life admin easier.

• Electronic calendaring. There are a range of options, but Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s offerings are the most common.
• To-do list app. This could be as simple as Google Tasks or as complex as Asana or Notion.
• Alerts/reminders. Built into both sets of tools above, the power of alerts is that they grab your attention instead of having to remember to look at your calendar or list.
• Subscriptions list as part of your other life admin docs. Just keeping a record of things plays a huge role in saving time with life admin. If that record can be securely shared with a partner or service provider in the future, that’s even more of a time-saver. Establishing a way of keeping records in Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or iCloud can save you significant time in the long run.

In addition to these four areas, because subscriptions are recurring costs, there’s a huge overlap between managing subscriptions and managing your budget. More and more, digital budgeting tools (e.g. Monarch Money, Origin) are helping identify subscriptions and cancel them for your automatically (notably, Rocket Money does this).

Notifying yourself to check in throughout the year

As I’ve said, subscriptions are meant to inspire mindlessness. They go on autopilot, and companies create sludgy systems that require work from you to manage. So, the last step of the system here is to make it easy on yourself to know when to check in on your subscriptions again.

If you start the year with current subscriptions, and then add a few along the way, you may manage them well, but when do you check in and assess what’s worth continuing and what’s not?That’s where a scheduled check-in with yourself can be great. Put the event on the calendar for early in the new year. Maybe it’s part of a bigger life admin date, either with just yourself or with a partner. If you want more of an idea of how to set an agenda for your check-ins, we have an explainer for that.