Simple rituals for shutting things down
How a daily shutdown/reset ritual helps you be intentional
Getting the most out of your life and work takes time. But time is scarce, so how do you find more of it, to engage with the stuff you want to engage with? The answer is: You don’t. There is no such thing as “finding time”; there is not even really such a thing as “making time”. Each of us has exactly 168 hours in a week, and no matter what we may do or wish, we’re not going to ever be able to find or make any more of it. Instead, the responsibility of each and every one of us is to allocate the time that we have, in a way that lines up with our goals and our values.
So in the real world, being intentional often looks simply like scheduling. It’s a very un-sexy idea, but I’m beginning to think that scheduling is key for being both productive and happy with what we’re doing here. I don’t mean setting up a super-strict, moment-by-moment regimen of what you’re going to do with every minute of the day, but simply creating a framework that gives your brain and body some markers for what should be happening and when so that your time is used well.
Time boxing is one way to do this. Another small way to set up those signals is a shutdown/reset ritual. I think I first heard about this idea years ago, like so many other things that are written about here, from Cal Newport, and I’ve been engaging in a shutdown/reset ritual almost every working day ever since. In today’s article, I’m going to describe why I think such rituals are important, what I do, and some suggestions for how you can get started.
What is a shutdown/reset and why somebody might do one
The shutdown/reset ritual is simply a brief time at the end of each working day, where you clean up your physical and virtual spaces, then reflect on and summarize the workday that is coming to an end. It is like a weekly review in miniature. It is a way of drawing the day to a close and prepping yourself both for the next working day and for the evening coming up.
There are at least three very good reasons to engage in these shutdown/reset rituals every working day:
It gives you a chance to clear the decks. I don’t know if it’s just me, but at the end of most working days, my physical workspace is a mess. And I find it hard to think straight if there is clutter, half empty coffee cups, scraps of paper, etc. lying all over the place. A similar thing can be said about my digital spaces — Lots of emails in my inboxes, downloaded research papers all over my computer desktop, and so forth. Before I can be expected to work productively the next time I engage with these spaces, I really need to declutter all of them. The shutdown/reset gives me a little window of time to do this. And if you spend a little bit of time on this every day, it’s never that much work on any single day.
It sends you a psychological signal that you are transitioning to a different schedule. It’s critically important for every person (faculty or otherwise) to realize that they were not made to work 24 hours a day. Bringing grading home to work on in the evenings or writing reports on the weekends, and so forth, is neither healthy nor sustainable. You need rest, and you need non-work activities to engage in, in order for you to do your best work and to obey the Law of the Whole Person. A daily shutdown/reset ritual can act as a sort of factory whistle that blows when your shift is over. It sends a clear signal to your body and to your brain that the working day is over and your non-working portion of your life can now begin without guilt. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need an outside stimulus for this, but in this day and age it’s critical. It’s especially needed by those who work at home, like I am right now while on sabbatical. The physical boundaries between work and home are nonexistent — my “commute” is a 30-second walk up the stairs from my office to the kitchen. So I need that shutdown/reset to flip the switch in my brain that the work day is over.
It gives you a heads up about any priority items that need to be handled tomorrow. In cleaning up your physical and digital spaces and reflecting back on the day you just spent, often you will surface new things to capture. Quite often, a handful of those new captures will be somewhat urgent or time-sensitive. It’s likely that you won’t need to handle those right that second. So the shutdown/reset gives you a chance to structure your next day around those things. It’s far better to learn about those things at the end of a day than at the beginning of a day. And very often items that appear to be EXTREMELY URGENT in the moment turn out to be not urgent at all, sometimes not even actionable, once you sleep on them.
How I do a shutdown/reset
Like I said, the shutdown/reset is a ritual — the same set of actions you perform at a regular cadence. Different people do this differently, and my own practice has evolved over the years. But as of today, this is how I do a shutdown/reset:
Get all inboxes to zero. I typically process my email, once in the morning and then once in the afternoon when I do my shutdown/reset. When I say process, I mean get to inbox zero. Since I also do this in the mornings every day and do a big sweep at the weekly review, my inboxes are never extremely full by the time I get to the shutdown/reset. So it’s no big deal to run through the Clarify process and get everything where it belongs before I shut things down for the day.
Tidy up my physical and digital workspaces. This means recycling unneeded papers, putting the pens back in the cup, taking dishes to the sink, wiping down my desk, and so forth — and doing similar things with my computer. This is purely my own preference because I’m just a much happier camper when I don’t have clutter and crap all over the place.
Make a list of three wins that I experienced during the day. These are accomplishments big and small that I can take credit for that add evidence to the notion that I had a good day: “I made it to the gym even though I didn’t want to go”; “My classes were fun and engaging”; “I got through the Faculty Senate meeting without murdering someone”; etc.
Make a list of three challenges that I experienced during the day. These aren’t necessarily failures to go along with the wins, but just challenges that I experienced, whether I overcame them or not: “Getting out of bed to go to the gym was hard even though I did it”; “I spent too much time on social media in the afternoon and ended up not getting my grading done”; “Had a difficult conversation with a student who is failing the class”; etc.
List three things that I learned that day. These can be items that I learned intellectually, or things that I learned about myself, realizations about my work, and so on: “I used generative AI to make a meme”; “I learned that I really need to get all of my course prep done before 10:00 AM or it won’t get done”; “I went to the Applied Math Seminar and learned about topological data analysis”; etc.
List one thing that I’m grateful for. The benefits of gratitude journaling have been well documented. I try to keep in my personal journal any instance where I feel gratitude for something, but I make a point to list at least one such thing every single day.
Write down my plans for the evening. I started doing this as part of my shutdown/reset a couple of years ago after realizing that after doing the first six items on this list and driving home, I would often eat dinner and then collapse into a chair to watch TV for the entire evening, mindlessly and without intention. There’s certainly nothing wrong with eating dinner and not much wrong with watching TV, as long as you are doing those things on purpose. I wasn’t, and entire areas of my life that I could only work on in the evenings or on weekends — for example, practicing my bass so I can be a better musician — were being ignored. So while I don’t over-plan my evenings (usually my plans consist of: eat dinner, read, then practice), and while I don’t always stick to my plan, before I quit work for the day I want to have some idea of what I plan on doing with that precious time in the evening before I have to go to bed.
Say, out loud: “SHUTDOWN COMPLETE”. This I definitely got from Cal Newport. It sounds dopey, but if you say “SHUTDOWN COMPLETE”, out loud so that you and everyone else around you can hear, it’s an undeniable and concrete signal that the workday is over — as if you flipped the power switch to the off position and there is literally no more energy going into that part of you until tomorrow. Yes, I have done this in public places before, like coffee shops, and yes, people looked at me funny.
This looks like a lot, but it isn’t. I estimate it takes me about 15-20 minutes on average, including the zeroing out of inboxes. I seriously don’t want to overthink it.
I do all this in Obsidian. I use the Periodic Notes plugin to create a daily note each day using this template. You’re free to use or modify this template as much as you want1. In the mornings, I complete the first part of the daily note, which asks for certain things that I plan to do or experience during the day. I add information to the daily note in the middle throughout the day as sort of “captain’s log”. And you will see the framework for the shutdown/reset ritual toward the bottom of that note.
When I do my weekly reviews, I go through each of the week’s daily notes and look for broad, overarching patterns on things that are working for me that I need to double down on, experiences that I’m having that I need to learn from, and things that are not working for me that I need to work on changing or quitting. Very often the shutdown/reset part of the daily note has the highest quality information in it, and I learn a lot from the aggregation of all those days’ reflections.
What you might also do
What I just described is my own process and it’s not necessarily optimized for everyone. Some things you might do in your shutdown/reset ritual, In addition to or instead of some of the things I’ve listed, include:
Set up a calendar or agenda for the next day. In my shutdown/resets. I actually don’t look ahead into the next day — I’m merely recapping the day that’s coming to a close. But you don’t have to do that. You can look ahead at your next day, check through the calendar, look at your schedule, and then make a little agenda for what you want to do and when you want to do it. This is, for me, taken care of at the beginning of the week in the weekly review when I set up time blocks. But it’s conceivable that you could set up time blocks on a day-by-day basis rather than once for the entire week.
Decide what your MIT will be for the next day. MIT stands for Most Important Thing: the one thing that you insist that you get done in the following day. This involves going through your next actions list and deciding on one and only one thing that you will try to get done that day. And as iNSERT NAME HERE says, you should convince yourself that until you get that MIT done, everything else is just a distraction.
Capture stray items, but don’t process them. It’s almost inevitable that when doing a cleanup of your digital and physical workspaces, you will find stuff that grabs your attention and needs to be processed at some point. At the end of the day, you may not have the time or energy to do that. So simply capture them, put them into your physical inbox or a digital inbox folder on your computer or however you might manage it, and then save the processing for later when you get a chance to do a mini review2.
Now you do it
Setting up a shutdown/reset ritual is dead simple and provides outsized benefits to you. So here’s some homework for you.
Decide how you prefer to shut your working day down. That could be through doing the stuff that I’ve listed above or a small subset of those things or something completely different. But be intentional about it and write down the steps on a note, either physical or digital, that you can refer back to. But keep it simple! Maybe something you can do in 10 minutes so it’s a can’t-miss proposition.
Then do one of these shutdown/resets either today or tomorrow. Don’t overthink it. Set a timer for maybe 10 minutes, and when the timer goes off, just stop where you are and put everything away, say SHUTDOWN COMPLETE, and then stop working and don’t start again until the following workday. This last part can be extremely hard for a lot of people in academia because we are so institutionalized into thinking we have to work all the time. But this step is here, and this entire shutdown/reset ritual concept is here, to break that brainwashing. So practice it. Over the course of several days, you will begin to associate a certain time of the day ,with a certain practice, and then with a cessation of work. And this is a path towards being a whole person again.
If you haven’t done so already, spend time getting all your inboxes down to zero. Use the weekly review if you must. If you haven’t set up a weekly review yet, start doing that this week. By getting all your inboxes down to zero once, it’s going to make it easier to maintain them near zero on a day-by-day basis.
Etc.
Health: Since September, I have been using the Ideal You system to try to lose weight. I’ve been 20 or more pounds overweight for most of my adult life, and earlier this year I hit an all-time high (or low?) of 212 pounds which by some estimations is almost 50 pounds overweight. I knew drastic measures were needed — I’d tried other approaches with no success. Ideal You is a 10-week program, 6 weeks of which involve significant restrictions on what, when, and how much one eats, along with a regimen of supplements and weekly coaching. It works: I am on week 5 and have so far lost around 25 pounds, and am today just 8 pounds from my goal weight. Furthermore my entire operating system around food has been rewired — I find I have no interest in crushing a pizza or a Taco Bell order like I used to but prefer cleaner fresh food instead. Physical health is a precondition from the sort of complete life that I write about here, and if you’re in a similar situation I highly, highly recommend Ideal You. It may not be available in your area but give it a look.
Music: We recently lost the great neo-soul pioneer D’Angelo who shockingly passed away from cancer. I’ve been in awe of the Voodoo album for some time, (especially since it has Pino Palladino on bass, one of my inspirations and who I’ve featured in this section before). Just listen to this. Gone too soon.
I have not modified this note from the original that I use, so if you use it, note a few things: First, you’ll need the Dataview plugin to run the code you see. Second, I have checkboxes for my email accounts when I clear inboxes, and for privacy I have removed those; insert your own. Also you may not be using Todoist or Google Keep, so insert a checkbox instead for any other inbox you may have. Third, I have references to my weekly and quarterly reviews; remove or modify those as needed.
A quick mini-review where you take five or so minutes to scan your calendar and next actions list and triage a few emails, is a good thing to do if you have a lull in the day, or if you temporarily run out of energy to do something creative. David Allen says that at any moment while you are actively working, the active work should be one of two things: Executing a next action, or “scanning the horizon” which generally refers to attending to your system itself.