Weeks with several big releases, US CPI on one day and UK CPI on another, tend to break a normal shutdown routine. The market stays on your mind and evening checks creep in.
A routine designed for those weeks:
Write tomorrow's plan before closing, including whether you'll trade the news hour at all. "No trades 13:20 to 13:45 London", written the evening before, is easier to keep than a decision made at 13:25.
Remove the phone app for the week. It sounds extreme, but evening checks cost sleep, and sleep affects the next morning more than anything you'd see on the chart.
Review one number each day: was the plan respected today. Leave the P/L review to Friday.
Why this works: news weeks create a lot of decisions, and the bad ones get made under time pressure. Moving decisions to the calm evening before reduces the number made during the spike.
How to tell if it helps: compare plan adherence and R on news weeks before and after you adopt it. Even a few weeks of comparison will show whether the number of unplanned news trades goes down.
My worst news week last year was the one where US CPI and the Bank of England landed two days apart, and I ended up checking GBPUSD on my phone at eleven at night after the first release. I slept badly, took a sloppy trade the next morning before the second number, and gave back most of what I'd made. That week is the reason I now do something very close to what you describe.
The written plan is the part that does the heavy lifting for me. On Sunday I go through the calendar and write a short line for each day, like "flat from 13:15 to 13:50" or "no GBP trades before the rate decision". Having it on paper means I'm not negotiating with myself while the countdown is running.
I'd add one small thing to the end of the day. I close the platform completely rather than minimising it, and I put the laptop in another room. If the charts aren't a click away, the evening checks mostly stop on their own.
