The Conditional Move: Please use it.

1.  If you need to spend more than 20 seconds to figure out what's going on, and you think a few moves ahead, then  you decide on an exchange.  You decide to take his queen, and, naturally, his lone pawn protecting the queen will take your queen, and so you take his queen and go to the next board.

But... why not just use the "conditional move" option and make your next move?

It has the following advantages:

1.  It saves YOU time.  You spent x amount of time digesting the position, you've decided to exchange queens and then something else.  Once you hit "submit", there's no going back.  OK, but you've already got this board on the top of your mind, that's 20 seconds less you'll need to spend if you go ahead and make your next move, so, go ahead and make it.  That's 20 seconds *more* you can spend on your next board.

2.  It saves the other guy time, also.  Be a man, give the gift of time to your fellow human being.  It's a win / win, sure.  But YOU are one of the winners.  

3.  By saving time for YOU, that's more chess for you.  If you only have x amount of time for chess per day, why spend a lot of x re-digesting the same board?  

Now, if you object to the above, saying that you want the other guy to waste his time, remember, you want to learn better chess.  

Notice that my prior paragraph was, itself, a conditional move.  

Waste of time are conditional moves if you ask me.

I use conditional moves all the time (for obvious moves) but none of my opponents seem to be using it. I really hope more people start using it soon 

It prevents accidental stalemates.

Also it saves thinking time.  Once I've thought about a position for a while, why not spend a few more seconds and enter the follow up moves?   The obvious ones are simple recaptures, but also if you have a plan, entering the second and third moves to the plan keep you from forgetting later, it saves you time to study the next game. 

I do both PC and phone and use conditionals rather regularly.   I definitely miss being able to enter conditionals from the phone. 

You can enter conditional moves on your phone, just not from the app. Honestly, the app is a pile of garbage for anything but live chess and the web client is still better than that. So, basically I'm advising you to do yourself a favor and ditch the app for the mobile chess.com website and you will have access to all the features.

Fair enough.  I'll take your advice and  try the phone web version next time.  

There is a certain amount of pleasure that I could use a conditional move to put someone in check mate while I am away.

In other words, without even being aware of it, I could check-mate a real live person while I am:

sleeping,

on the toilet,

or even after I suffer a fatal car crash and have passed to the next world. 

Me at the gates of heaven:

"Can I get in?"

"Well, it's going to be close.  You gave charity, were kind to a few animals and didn't cheat too much on your homework.  On the other hand, you spent a lot of time on porn sites, ate too much and didn't brush your teeth properly, you should have brushed up and down, not side to side.  It's going to be close.   Wait a minute, a new development!   This will decide it!   A young child, back on earth, is playing  his first games of chess.  Right now he's about to enter his move into Chess.com.  The bad news is that you've set up a 'conditional move' and you're going to check-mate him if he moves his rook instead of his pawn.  If that happens, he's going to be shocked to see you've automatically set up a move to crush - not only his position - but his spirit.  He's going to be a 'loser' the rest of his life, fail to ask Little Mary out on a date and instead settle for that abusive lady who will turn his life into a living h-ll.  Which, it's official, is now ironically the perfect segue for my final answer to your initial question...