Why and how to create a daily shutdown ritual
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To get the most from your workday, try something that might seem a bit counterintuitive at first: stop working. Completely. Stop thinking about work or checking your work email. We’re talking a total and thorough disengagement from all things work. Do this for an absolute minimum of twelve consecutive hours. Then go back to work. At the end of the day, stop thoroughly again. Keep it up. Every workday.
Right now you may be thinking that this isn’t counterintuitive at all, that this is, in fact, what anyone who isn’t a bona fide workaholic already does. Beg to differ: 70% of Americans check work email after 6pm and 58% admit to checking in with the office at least once a day while on vacation; in the UK, 55% of working adults say they check work emails during their off time; in Japan, there’s a word for dying from too much work.
Most of us aren’t fully unplugging from work at all, let alone long enough to get the restorative benefits of time off. That could have something to do with a misunderstanding about what it takes to really unplug—if you’re just sticking a pin in things and walking away from your desk, you’re not disengaging; you’re merely lengthening your tether. To thoroughly disengage, you need a shutdown ritual.
What can a shutdown ritual do for me?
A shutdown ritual is a set of tasks performed at the end of every work session in the same order. The tasks executed in the shutdown ritual should all revolve around two things:
Wrapping up today
Preparing for the next workday
The specifics of the tasks performed vary from person to person—Cal Newport (author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism) actually utters the words, “Schedule shutdown, complete,” while Michael Hyatt (creator of the Full Focus Planner) pre-loads his computer* with only the programs and apps he’ll need the next day. The point, though, remains the same: to give yourself an off-ramp and all of the benefits that using one provides.
3 reasons to create a shutdown ritual:
1. Set yourself up for a productive tomorrow. The easiest way to work is to show up, log in, and go wherever the day takes you. Maybe you’ll spend a half hour in your inbox. Maybe that stretches to an hour or so if you peck out a few replies. Then perhaps there’s a bit of re-orienting… where was I on that project again? It might be that you get a lot done by just diving in and plowing through, but productivity isn’t (or shouldn’t be, anyway) about doing a lot of things—it’s about doing valuable things. And doing valuable things requires thought and willpower, both notably missing from the dive-in-and-go approach.
When you take a few minutes at the end of your workday to prepare adequately for the next one, you give yourself the chance to do more than just fall into an automatic routine come morning.
2. Give your subconscious mind the space it needs to work through problems and generate new ideas. If your downtime is spent quasi-working—which is to say, playing catch with your kid but composing an email to your boss in your head as you toss the ball, or sharing a meal with friends while preoccupied with worries about an upcoming presentation—you are wasting the very resource that will help you write the most brilliant, persuasive email you possibly can and nail that presentation like never before: indolence. Laziness, fun, boredom.
The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration—it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.—Tim Kreider, The 'Busy' Trap
This is something #hustleculture never addresses… the vast, subconscious stream of insights and innovations that the always-on approach to work leaves shamefully untapped. Is it really so difficult to believe that, for example, making a slingshot with a 9 year-old boy and using it to shoot empty soda cans off a fence will do more for your professional life than undersleeping and over-caffeinating could?
3. Get the most out of time off instead of diluting your fun and relaxation with distracting thoughts of work. Maybe this is the most important benefit of all: your shutdown ritual will help you have fun. You will leave work knowing that you have nothing to lose by really leaving—not just with your body but with your mind too—and that everything you need to move forward tomorrow will be there waiting for you when you get in. You can tackle that Netflix series, that camping trip, that dinner out with gusto and nary a care about your inbox.
Yes, on second thought this benefit really is the most important one. After all, if life is just what happens while you’re waiting till you have to go to work again, well... you deserve better than that.
It’s a small habit, the shutdown ritual, but consider what brushing your teeth—a very small habit indeed—does for you.
How do I create a shutdown ritual?
Like this:
1. Compose a list of tasks that will comprise your shutdown ritual. This first list is a draft that you’ll experiment with until you arrive at the shutdown tasks and order in which to execute them that works best for you. We recommend including these for sure:
- Review the workday. How'd it go? What did I make progress on? Where am I blocked? Am I blocking anyone else?
- Consider my next steps. What actions will move my most valuable projects forward?
- Sketch out a plan for my next workday.
- Log out and power down.
2. Try out your new shutdown ritual. You may discover tasks to include that you hadn’t thought of when you made your list. Add those in where they belong—order matters; try to follow what feels to you like a natural progression.
You may also find that some tasks don’t work well for you as part of a shutdown ritual. Go ahead and jettison those.
3. Keep experimenting until you have a list of tasks that make sense for you and an order for executing them that you like. By all means, try out the fun, rabbit’s-foot type things other shutdown ritualists use, but remember that just because Cal Newport says a “magic phrase” and Stephen King washes his hands doesn’t mean that those sorts of symbolic activities are more (or less!) worthy than simply reviewing the workday that’s ending and planning the next one. If it helps you fully disengage, it’s worthy.
4. Now use your shutdown ritual. Do it every workday. This is important. You are training your mind and body to associate these tasks (executed in this order) with closing out your workday in the same way that parents train their toddlers’ bodies and minds to associate bath + pajamas + teeth brushing + storytime with sleep.
That’s all there is to it.
Go forth and shut down.
Once you’ve ingrained the habit, you may notice that you don’t need to be rigid about it in order to get the benefits of using a shutdown ritual. Let’s say, for example, that a client or coworker interrupts your shutdown with a pressing need for your thoughts on something. You’ll likely find that this disruption in your sequence of tasks isn’t a problem at all. Once the conversation is over, just pick up where you left off.
Though you can probably skip the ritual entirely on occasion without issue, you’ll feel it… a mild sense of having left something undone. The difference between this sense and the distraction that so often goes with not having a shutdown ritual at all is the difference between leaving the house knowing you left your bed unmade and leaving knowing the oven’s on.
Lastly, you will spend less time getting into work mode in the mornings (this is especially true if you use a startup ritual as well as a shutdown ritual) because you have a plan for the day prepared and waiting, and you’ve gotten full use of your time away from work.
Think of it this way: the more thoroughly you detach from work in your off time, the more deeply you can focus when you’re on the clock.
*Though Hyatt’s reasoning makes sense, we recommend shutting your machine down daily. To quote our Systems Administrator, “Especially with laptops, programs glom on to resources and don't let go.” It’s no better for your computer to be always-on than it is for you.
Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic
The rock: It can’t possibly matter if I do [annoying task] today. Aren’t we temporary? Brief ripples on the river of time? Why bother? The hard place: I feel bad about myself when I fail to do simple, if dreaded tasks. There is a path between these two, and an app called Finch helps me find it.