Originally posted 3/11/22

As an entrepreneur whose office is at home, I struggle daily with shutting down work and walking away. I don’t know many people in my situation who don’t struggle with the same thing. What caused me to start paying attention to this was my Full Focus Planner. At the beginning of the planner, there is a section to set up a series of routines. First, a morning ritual (we've heard about those), and I have a blog post about it. See that here. There is a workday startup ritual, a workday shutdown ritual, and an evening ritual. I've filled out all these rituals (and some I maintain). I love my morning routine. For that, I follow Hal Elrod's Miracle Morning.

I still have not mastered the workday shutdown or evening ritual with all these tools at my disposal. So, as I discover the tools and routines to help me end my workday or unpack it, as this blog title suggests, I thought I would take you along with me through the process.

In my reading and watching videos on this topic, I found this great article with seven tips on successfully shutting down and unpacking your workday. From Memory.ai, “Workday shutdown rituals:7 great ways to end the day” Is a great collection of simple steps to take to help you end your workday the right way. What is a workday shutdown routine? Nothing overly complicated. It’s just a few small routine tasks that help zip up your day nicely and prepare for a successful tomorrow.

The space on my planner for these tasks is set up like “to-do” lists, giving me 12 spots to add workday shutdown tasks. Here are the few I have listed at this time:

1. Update tomorrow's schedule: I love doing this the night before when I do it because it's one more minor task to accomplish the following day. It always takes all the to-do thoughts out of my head, and that action goes a long way to help clear my mind for a restful night's sleep.

2. Migrate unfinished todos: This goes hand in hand with tomorrow's to-do list. Some of those tasks would be uncompleted tasks from the day before.

3. Review Goals: The Full Focus Planner is goal-focused, and its purpose is to bring goals from setting to fruition through a series of smaller goals throughout the week, month, or quarter. Making it a habit to do this helps keep me focused on what I have decided is essential to accomplish.

4. Print next day's docs: This is very specific to my industry as a Mobile Notary and Loan Signing Agent. If I have orders for the next day and the documents are ready, printing them the night before will take a massive task off my plate for the following day.

5. Clean Desk and Organize: I don’t know anyone who sits down at their messy and cluttered desk that feels motivated and creative in the morning. Having a clean space to start with (that I will definitely mess up throughout the day) helps my brain stay focused on the tasks.

6. Shut Off: this is super simple. After I have completed all the previous steps, the final step is to shut off. Shut off my light, shut off my computer, and walk away. It's a great idea, but it rarely happens.

The process I just explained is what the article outlines;

• Gathering outstanding tasks, requests, and questions

• Prioritize and sketch out the next day.

Another great tip from this article is to “reset your digital workspace.” What would it feel like if the 400 emails you had from yesterday were down to just a few new ones that popped up overnight? There is a process I have heard of, and I have tried to maintain it but have been unsuccessfully at this point. It's taking your inbox and addressing each email. Move to an action folder or delegate if you have a team. You do this quickly through all your emails, so you have an email to-do list in the morning, and everything has been promptly addressed. The article's definition of digital reset also has you close down all the open tabs.

Any steps you take to manage or mitigate your digital projects at the end of your workday will inevitably make the beginning of your workday that much less task burdened.

The remaining steps outlined in the article are as follows:

• Enjoy a quick win: Knock out one or more easy tasks so they don’t follow you to the next day.

• Take stock of your achievement: As you take the time to pull all these tasks together, take stock of what you did accomplish today. Doing this allows you to see what worked and what didn’t and adjust accordingly.

• Set an evening intention: Think about what you want to do with your evening. I would encourage you to not choose overcomplicated items. Perhaps it's something like playing a board game with your family or sitting down to read a few pages from that book sitting untouched on your side table. Simple is the key here.

• Perform a ritual action. I love how the article explains this step. They write, “Shutdown actions can help make the invisible borders between work and personal time more distinct, especially when working from home. This could be practically anything: scheduling a workout immediately for the end of your workday, leaving your office to perform a “mock commute” walk around the block, packing away your work gear and placing your laptop in a special “stowage” spot, bashing out a chore, or simply relocating to another room. Cal Newport makes his action verbal – speaking aloud a special “termination statement” to end his day!”

I don’t know about you, but I have found this MemoryAi article beneficial in laying out the steps to assist with our shut-down routines. At the end of our day, a few small steps and small actions could help make the following morning and day more productive, successful, and less challenging to navigate.

I hope you have found this information as helpful as I have. Let me know if you have practices or procedures to unpack and shut down your workday. I would love to hear all about it.

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Also, If you'd like to check out my Youtube video about this project, with a detailed look at Michael Hyatt's Full Focus Planner- check that out here.

Jennifer Cooper

JKC Mobile Notary