296. Work Is Never Finished (So Stop Waiting for It to Be)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Marissa: Do you ever feel like this?  Work is never really actually finished.  There’s always one more email, one more thing to wrap up, that task that just keeps lingering that you can just not get to for love or for money. So, if you’re waiting until work is done to close your laptop, unfortunately you’re probably gonna be waiting forever. Today we’re talking about how to actually end your workday.

[00:00:16] Welcome to Focus on this, the most productive podcast on the internet. I’m Marissa Hyatt.

[00:00:21] Joel: And I’m Joel Miller.

[00:00:22] Marissa: This is where we remind you of something you already know. It’s not about getting more things done, it’s about getting the right things done,

[00:00:31] Joel: both at work and in life. And today we’re talking about something most of us struggle with.

[00:00:37] As Marissa mentioned, we’re talking about actually ending the workday.

[00:00:44] Marissa: You know, I feel like one of the things that I hear. Almost on a weekly basis inside of our double win coaching community is people coming to our calls asking the question, how do I stop work?

[00:00:58] Joel: Like, turn it off.

[00:00:59] Marissa: How do I turn it off?

[00:01:01] Joel: Right?

[00:01:01] Marissa: Because it feels like unless you have a child coming in and screaming at you, a spouse coming in and knocking on your door or. I don’t know. The lights literally going off in your office or the electricity or something like that. It does feel like this can become never ending. Yeah, and we’ve heard this many times.

[00:01:21] We use it in our marketing, the idea of the never ending to-do list. You’ve probably felt this. I feel it, that there’s just always more to be done than there is time on the calendar, and yet somehow we have. For the rest of our lives to be living, and it’s really difficult to get there when we feel like.

[00:01:41] There’s no end in sight on work.

[00:01:43] Joel: Well, and the more we prioritize work, the less full the rest of our life is, and that means that work expands to fill the vacuum and suddenly you’re like working on a project at nine o’clock at night. You are letting things persist on past closing hours, quote unquote, despite the fact that.

[00:02:05] There’s no need for you to be there. You’re probably not even doing your best work at that point. You ought to just go home, you know, maybe you already are home. That could be part of the problem. We should probably talk about that. But there’s this inability to turn it off because work doesn’t actually have an end.

[00:02:21] There’s always another task. There’s always another project. There’s always another initiative. And so we’re just constantly stuck in this place of persisting at the laptop when we ought to close it and go outside or something better.

[00:02:33] Marissa: And I think if we’re really honest with ourselves, we like to work.

[00:02:38] Yeah. Most of us who are listening to this podcast and in our community are people who care deeply about what they do, and they also probably find a lot of sense of purpose. Frankly, probably some sense of control in their work.

[00:02:54] Joel: Oh, yeah. No,

[00:02:55] Marissa: the rest of their life is chaos. A lot of times we can bury ourselves in work as a way to kind of ignore all the areas of our life that feel out of control.

[00:03:06] And if we’re not careful, this can be a really slippery slope into overworking, whether it’s because of all the demands that we have or. Kind of unintentionally, unconsciously because of our own actual internal desire.

[00:03:21] Joel: Yeah, so I mean, we could kind of look at it from two ends. On the one end, you might have a work culture where there is no clear cutoff.

[00:03:30] Managers and others are texting you into the evening, emailing you into the evening, slacking you into the evening. They don’t have a turnoff, and so you don’t get a turnoff either. The expectation is, if I’m working, you’re working or. That might be a self-imposed expectation. If they’re working, I’m working.

[00:03:48] And so you’ve got that pressure. On the other side, work has definable wins. You reach the end of a project, you can say, yay, look, I did it. You’ve got metrics that you can look at. You’ve got definable completion points. You have all of these things that tell you you’re doing well at work, whereas at home.

[00:04:08] Raising kids doesn’t have any moment where you’re like, Hey, I did that thing. I finished that thing. Like there is no finish to that stuff. There is no metrics to say whether you’re winning, and a lot of times they’re really hard. And so you end up with this situation where it’s easier to default to work, and if that’s what’s bringing in the revenue, that keeps everything going.

[00:04:29] It’s also easy to justify it.

[00:04:31] Marissa: I think just to speak on the flip side of somebody who doesn’t have kids too. I have a lot of margin in my life, and if you’re single or childless, you probably feel this too, where nobody is coming in and knocking on your door and saying, Hey, when are you gonna wrap up work?

[00:04:46] Right? Right. It can literally go for as long as I want it to go and nobody will know. That’s actually the bigger danger in terms of people who are single is, is there is no, no checks and balances in terms of this. Nobody is. Yeah, that’s fascinating. Knocking by the door, and if you’re somebody who doesn’t have a rich life outside of work, you have a thriving social life or some kind of hobby or something to pull you away from work.

[00:05:16] It can obviously feel much easier, much more satisfying, and frankly a lot less lonely if you just keep bearing yourself in work.

[00:05:25] Joel: Mm-hmm.

[00:05:25] Marissa: No matter which side of your, the equation you’re on, whether it’s, you’re on the side with Joel, you’ve got kids, and you know, that’s really challenging and feels. In a lot of ways unproductive, or there’s no clear finish line to when that that work is over.

[00:05:40] That work is never really over and inside of work. You have those clear wins, or if you’re like me, where you have to manufacture that life in terms of getting yourself. Away from the laptop, go outside, see other people, live your life. It’s really challenging. Yeah, and the point here is that whether it’s because you work at home, mostly remote work has, I think, has exacerbated this problem, or if it’s just because you enjoy it or the demands are there, or whatnot.

[00:06:11] It’s really hard and frankly overlooked for most of us to have any kind of ritual or routine around stopping work at a specific hour. We have to be very intentional in order to do this and to do it well.

[00:06:26] Joel: We’ve, you know, exacerbated all of our therapy bills right now by giving us something to worry about that maybe we weren’t even worrying about before this episode began.

[00:06:36] Let’s turn to addressing how to start solving this problem. The first thing to do is actually decide when work is over for the day. As we’ve said, work is never really over, which means you need some kind of arbitrarily chosen stopping point, and sometimes this is culturally reinforced. I mean, we know about the nine to five.

[00:06:58] There’s an implication there that you’re stopping at five. In our company, we tend to work more like nine to three, at least. Nominally people work in and outside of that, because we have flex hours, and for instance, Natalie on my team is gonna be working later this evening because she’s busy doing some gardening today,

[00:07:14] Marissa: right

[00:07:15] Joel: in the middle of the day, which is awesome.

[00:07:16] Marissa: Awesome.

[00:07:17] Joel: But you have to have a point at which you say normally. Sparring emergencies and they have to be real emergencies or it doesn’t count. I’m done for today.

[00:07:27] Marissa: You have to define when done is, and it’s not when the to-do list stops, because

[00:07:33] Joel: it doesn’t.

[00:07:33] Marissa: No, it doesn’t, or it’s not when you finally get in box zero because the truth is the likelihood of being able to do that every single day at the exact same time.

[00:07:42] Slim to none. So you have to manufacture this. So you have to decide when am I gonna be finished with work? And depending on what type of work you’re in, depending on what this looks like in your life, what you have outside of your life, what kind of double win, we talk about the double win a lot, winning at work and succeeding at life.

[00:08:00] So what are you doing outside of work? Mm-hmm. And what do you wanna make time for? You’ve gotta decide this, and I wanna challenge all of you who are listening. To not ask the question, when do I think I can be done? Like in terms of when is the work? When do I think the work will be finished? But when do you really want to be done to create proper rest for yourself and proper restoration where you can actually unplug, have plenty of time.

[00:08:28] For most of us, we’re working, you know, in the workday, right? Nine to five ish, somewhere around there. So. What do you wanna do with your evenings and how do you wanna spend those so that you can wind down properly, but where you can actually have an enjoyable evening? Yeah. And you may not know what to do with that evening yet, and that’s kind of a second part of of the conversation.

[00:08:49] But when do you want to be able to wrap up work? And if you are married, if you do have children, you may ask your spouse like, what seems like a reasonable hour? For me to wrap up

[00:08:58] Joel: Totally. And it’s worth saying that imposing a constraint on yourself like this actually has some pretty significant benefits.

[00:09:07] It actually helps you prioritize in a way that you might not otherwise consider. Because if you think about it like a budget, I only have X number of hours to work today, then you don’t put stuff off in a certain, you know, in that kind of bad, procrastinating way. And by the way, here’s a tease. Next week we’re actually gonna talk about procrastination, and its many forms, and I can guarantee you it’s going to be something you’ve never thought of in this way before, but I get ahead of myself, right?

[00:09:35] The idea here is that. If you have this budget, you can actually then think more proactively around how you’re gonna spend that time. It’s really easy if you don’t quite have an end time, you know, at three or four o’clock or earlier in the day to kind of put off something hard that you don’t wanna think about.

[00:09:52] ’cause you know you can come back to it later that night.

[00:09:55] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:09:55] Joel: And even if it’s due the next day, you might think that. Like that’s maybe reasonable if you don’t have a life, but you do have a life. Yeah. And so we need to be thinking about how can we use this budget of time in the most effective way?

[00:10:10] Marissa: And if you’re a leader, if you’re somebody who is in some kind of leadership position, you may feel like this is more challenging for you because there’s more responsibilities.

[00:10:21] You know, you’re managing several people and, and there’s just. So much to do

[00:10:27] Joel: and there may be people further up the chain than you who are very demanding, who have no work life boundaries, and they’re more than happy to ask you to do stuff at night.

[00:10:36] Marissa: Let me say this. It is more critical for you to establish an in time to your workday than anyone else on your team.

[00:10:45] And the reason is, is because all of those people that you manage, and frankly, even the ones that you don’t, the people that either are above you who are managing you, they’re gonna be taking cues from me

[00:10:57] Joel: totally.

[00:10:58] Marissa: And if they see you logged in at all hours of the day and night, there’s a subtle implication that they should be doing the same.

[00:11:07] Joel: When I was at Thomas Nelson, Michael tells this story, there was a high powered executive there. This guy was a hard driver. I still know this guy. Still talk to him every now and then. He’s a great dude. But he had this one habit of working late into the evening in the office, and what that meant was that people that reported to him.

[00:11:28] Couldn’t really leave because he was there and they felt like they needed to be there. And of course that trickled out even outside of the office too. And it set an example that if you want to be an executive in this company, you’ve gotta put in the work. And that means being at the office. All hours.

[00:11:47] Yeah. And that’s just not great for anybody else,

[00:11:50] Marissa: right?

[00:11:51] Joel: It’s not great for you, but it’s not great for anybody else either because you’re signaling to all those people that they need to do what you do in order to rise as high as you’ve risen.

[00:11:58] Marissa: Well, this kind of leads into the next point, which is why do most people not set hard boundary around their work and.

[00:12:08] I think one of the biggest reasons that this is happening today is because of remote work or, yeah, frankly, being online. Even if you work in an office, most of us have our Slack or teams or whatever communication it is linked up to your phone. If nothing else, your boss or your teammates have your phone number and they’re probably texting you.

[00:12:32] You’ve got your email there. And whatever other work apps that you have are probably connected in some way to your smartphone. And it is more challenging, I think, than ever in history to unplug. It used to be that we went to the office and even if you worked several hours late into the evening, there was a point when you stopped and you went home.

[00:12:56] Joel: Right.

[00:12:56] Marissa: For most of us, I would say at this point in time. That actually isn’t true any longer. Even if we go into that,

[00:13:04] Joel: right. Work is in your pocket.

[00:13:05] Marissa: Yeah, it’s in your pocket. You’re carrying, literally carrying it home with you every single day. Every single evening, every single weekend. It is there. The temptation is there.

[00:13:15] Frankly, every time I open my laptop, even on the weekend for personal things. My work is glaring me straight in the face,

[00:13:23] Joel: right? If you’re one of those kind of people that likes to watch shows with your laptop open, for instance, you’re hosed. Yeah. You check your inbox and all of a sudden you’ve got stuff in front of you that you kind of feel like you need to address.

[00:13:36] Even if you don’t, and you know, you may be, I don’t know, halfway through an episode of Yellowstone, finding yourself missing plot points because you’ve just answered so and so about such and such.

[00:13:46] Marissa: It literally happened to me last night, Joel, which the irony is not lost on me, but last night I was watching a show.

[00:13:54] And I am getting ready to kick off a landscaping project for my backyard. Finally, I’ve been waiting to do this for years. So excited. It’s finally happening. So I’ve got all these bids in for things like irrigation and the various landscaping pieces, and I’m trying to determine what I’m gonna do and what I wanna not do, and so on and so forth.

[00:14:15] And so I was looking at some of those last night on my laptop while I was watching a show. I just was, you know, pulled it up to look at it and. As I was sitting there, I bounced over on my browser to another tab.

[00:14:28] Joel: Mm mm I can already see where this is going.

[00:14:31] Marissa: This is the problem is there’s a dopamine hit for me.

[00:14:34] I am in the world of marketing, right? I’m constantly aware of our revenue, what is coming in and what may not be coming in, and I look at various dashboards each day that show me what’s coming in, and there’s a dopamine hit there.

[00:14:51] Joel: Well, and customers are buying at all hours.

[00:14:53] Marissa: All

[00:14:54] Joel: hours, which means there’s new information at all hours.

[00:14:56] Marissa: And often in the evenings is one of our most prominent times when people shop. I mean, we know this in our own behavior, right? You get done with work, you start scrolling social media, you get hit with an ad, you go over and you start shopping. And this happened to me last night where I started looking at our dashboard and I realized a a few minutes in, five minutes in or something, oh my gosh, why am I looking at work right now?

[00:15:18] Joel: I’m supposed to be thinking about my garden.

[00:15:21] Marissa: I’m supposed to be thinking about my garden or the TV show I’m watching or whatever it is, or just relaxing. And here I am now strategizing in my mind because I’m staring at numbers and going, okay, what if we do this or that, or how could we affect this? And my brain started spinning and I started finding myself wanting to text one of my team members, Dave, and he and I constantly are going back and forth.

[00:15:44] He is just amazing and. I had literally my phone in my hand ready to text him with an idea, and I was like, hold the phone. Literally it is like eight 15 at night. He is hopefully enjoying himself with his family and not thinking about work. And if I text him, that’s immediately gonna pull him in. He’s gonna be tempted.

[00:16:08] We love what we do, right? And it’s very easy when you love what you do to feel like. Work isn’t work

[00:16:15] Joel: right. You know, we’ve talked in the past about Gloria, mark and her work around like distraction and how it works. The same thing is happening here, but now in reverse of the way it normally happens. We normally think about distraction in terms of our work like this.

[00:16:31] Fame comes in to our cognitive frame, you know, the, like the little workspace in our head that we’ve created to do the tasks that are in front of us. It obliterates it and we go handle the distraction. Maybe it’s a personal distraction, maybe it’s another sort of work problem, and then it takes us a while to recon, reassemble that little workspace in our heads that we were using to do whatever it was that we were doing, whether it’s working on a garden or enjoying a show or whatever.

[00:16:59] All we’ve done here is reverse that dynamic where now work is obliterating Yes. That peaceful, you know, cognitive frame of I’m doing this project for myself or I’m watching a show or whatever. And then we have to somehow get back out of that work headspace and get back into a relaxation headspace or a rejuvenation headspace and get back to our life.

[00:17:20] And what that means is that work is actually. Encroaching into our private time in ways that are hard to combat once they get started.

[00:17:29] Marissa: And the example that I’m sharing is a positive example, right? I, I got excited, my wheel started turning. Mm-hmm. But more often than not, it’s the opposite. It’s,

[00:17:38] Joel: it’s a

[00:17:39] Marissa: problem.

[00:17:39] You check in and there’s a problem, there’s a challenge. Your anxiety immediately spikes, your cortisol spikes, and next thing you know, you’re spiraling. And as we know, the longer the day goes on, the less resourceful we are. Right? Right. Those kind of our catastrophizing thinking grows as the day goes on.

[00:17:58] And so if you are checking in at eight or 9:00 PM into something that you think. It is no big deal. Like your inbox, you’re like, no big deal. I’m just gonna check my inbox, or I’m gonna check that dashboard really quick. Or even on semi by accident, you check it. And next thing you know, you’re flooded with anxiety.

[00:18:15] And that anxiety is gonna prevent you from being present in whatever kind of context you’re in in that moment. It’s going to prevent you from being able to fall asleep well and easy and stay asleep, asleep, and these things tend to spiral. And so there’s kind of the positive side of we love what we do and we’re excited.

[00:18:35] And then there’s the negative side of. You just saw something that is now producing a big problem, that’s creating anxiety that is incredibly challenging to bounce back from.

[00:18:46] Joel: Another angle on this that I think is worth considering is that this kind of seemingly virtuous overwork where we push on into the evening might actually be disguising real problems in the business if work demands out of you.

[00:19:01] 9, 10, 12 hours of the day, there are upstream problems that probably need to be addressed in what you’re actually doing. Because if you can’t get it done in a reasonable time every day or whatever we decide is done, then you have an issue possibly in. What you’re actually trying to work on. Yeah. Maybe there’s prioritization that needs to happen.

[00:19:26] Maybe you need to be eliminating some projects. Maybe you’re doing a lot of work that is not actually amounting to a lot of great results because you haven’t stopped to analyze whether or not this pattern of overwork reveals that there’s something more problematic in the business.

[00:19:42] Marissa: Yeah. I think a, a way to figure this out is ask yourself, why are you working?

[00:19:48] These long hours, what is it? And really get honest, and this is what we do in our coaching program. I mean, I had a call probably about two weeks ago with a client who was telling me that. She’s very successful and she is struggling to end work before 7:00 PM every day. And she’s got two young boys at home, um, that I think are like middle school age.

[00:20:08] And she was like, you know, it feels like no matter what I cannot get done with work before 7:00 PM. And so I asked her why. That was the first thing that I asked her. And you know, she said, well, it’s just ’cause I have so much to do. And I was like, no, what’s really going on here?

[00:20:22] Joel: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:22] Marissa: Be really honest with me and.

[00:20:25] We started uncovering this and it’s exactly what you’re talking about, where she realized she did not have clear priorities. Right. That was, that was actually the real cause of what was going on. The symptom was that she’s overworking. That’s not the problem is the overwork or a never ending to-do list, that’s very rarely the actual cause of the issue.

[00:20:44] Joel: Or like why is the to-do list never ending?

[00:20:47] Marissa: Yes,

[00:20:48] Joel: because everything goes on it. ’cause there’s not clear priorities.

[00:20:51] Marissa: Because there’s not clear priorities. And I think that for most of this, we get into this kind of cycle, this rat race, so to speak, where we’re just not asking, we’re not stopping long enough to ask the questions.

[00:21:02] Right. What’s really going on? And. This is your invitation to stop and ask yourself, look in the mirror, what is really going on here? Because it could be that you’re just masking the real problems, and if you slow down for a minute, that you could actually get really clear and whether it’s, Hey, you’re not delegating anything and you’re trying to do everything yourself, and you probably have a very capable team, more than, more than likely, who can help with some of the things that you’re trying to just.

[00:21:33] Accomplish yourself,

[00:21:35] Joel: right?

[00:21:35] Marissa: Or there’s probably projects that you need to intentionally procrastinate, for instance, or, you know, readjust or you need to get clear on what the priorities are. So getting clear on why there’s overwork in the first place, I think is, is really helpful.

[00:22:02] Joel: We have basically now decided when work is gonna be over, let’s say it’s five o’clock. Yeah. And we’ve sort of answered the question, why haven’t we set a hard stop? The next thing to do is to actually schedule that hard stop. Like when are you going to stop? Pick a time. Schedule it.

[00:22:22] Marissa: Yes. So this is what we call the Workday shutdown ritual.

[00:22:26] And if you use the full Focus planner, you’ve probably seen this. This is such a phenomenal tool that I think a lot of people don’t use and can be extremely beneficial. And one of the easiest ways to do this is literally put about a 30 minute block on your calendar at the end of the workday, whatever time you want to end.

[00:22:44] So let’s say in this case it’s five o’clock, you’re going to block off four 30. To five o’clock so that you have the margin to be able to actually shut down work,

[00:22:55] Joel: right?

[00:22:55] Marissa: You’re not gonna be in meetings up all the way until five o’clock because we know there’s always things that come out of those meetings, right?

[00:23:03] There’s action items and then you’ve gotta check your email and check in with your team and you know, tie up those loose ends from the day or look through your notes from your meetings and so forth. And if you’re working up until the time that you need to be done. You’re actually not gonna be done at that time.

[00:23:18] Joel: No. What ends up happening is like, let’s say you’re in a meeting from four to five. Happens all the time, right? Everyone says, well, we’re done at five, therefore let’s cram this one meeting into this hour that’s available. And you walk outta that meeting with a bunch of notes, with a bunch of action items, with a bunch of other stuff that was accumulating while you were in that meeting, and of course, all day long, depending on what you were doing, and so.

[00:23:43] Workday shutdown ends up happening sometime that night,

[00:23:46] Marissa: right?

[00:23:46] Joel: Or potentially early the next morning. So you can get caught up before the workday starts. And what you’ve done is you’ve obliterated the ability to get rest, margin, time to unplug all of that.

[00:24:00] Marissa: And this actually compounds through the week. So as we end, you know, the week for most of us, typically Friday.

[00:24:08] If you’re not doing this well by the end of the week, there’s so much of that stuff to wrap up,

[00:24:14] Joel: just like a hangover of stuff.

[00:24:16] Marissa: And then it really, you know, you’re bleeding into the evenings and then probably the weekend because you weren’t able to wrap up what you needed to wrap up. So I actually, on Fridays, I don’t take meetings.

[00:24:28] We typically try to end our work days, like Joel said, around three o’clock. That doesn’t always happen for me. Sometimes it’s four o’clock or five o’clock, but I always try to do around three o’clock, and so for me, I don’t take meetings on Fridays after 2:00 PM

[00:24:43] Joel: Right,

[00:24:44] Marissa: so it’s actually earlier, like I give myself a full hour buffer on a Friday afternoon because I know there’s just inevitably more.

[00:24:51] Things to wrap up by the end of the week, and that’s really intentional on my part because I wanna be able to be done with work and go into the weekend and be fully present, not thinking on a Saturday or a Sunday, oh my gosh, I didn’t prepare for that meeting on Monday, or I didn’t get to that one report, and I’ve gotta tie that up before I go into next week.

[00:25:08] There’s nothing worse than that feeling.

[00:25:11] Joel: Some people are gonna say they can’t do that, right? They’re gonna say, I’m scheduled all the way up till the end of the day every day. It’s like they don’t ask the most obvious question, which would be what would have to be true for me to actually have back that last half hour?

[00:25:26] Yes. Or that last hour. What would have to happen for that to happen? Maybe you need to go sell your boss on it. Maybe you need to go sell your coworkers who all apparently want to meet at 4:00 PM

[00:25:36] Marissa: Right?

[00:25:36] Joel: What? Whatever it is. What would have to be true for me to wrap up? All of the sort of interactive stuff that I do, so I can preserve some time at the end of the day to close everything down at, say, 4:30 PM

[00:25:47] Marissa: and y’all, sometimes it’s as easy.

[00:25:50] As suggesting a different time to the person asking for the meeting. If you are not the one requiring the meeting from four to 5:00 PM on a Friday, you know, afternoon, and hopefully you’re not. And if you are, you need to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself why. But if you’re not that person who’s calling the meeting, if somebody else, even if it’s your boss.

[00:26:11] You can say, Hey, totally, I would love to meet. Could you actually do two to three instead? Right. Or whatever time you have available on your calendar, you know, it doesn’t always have to just be an automatic yes to the exact time that they’re requesting,

[00:26:25] Joel: right? We can negotiate. We

[00:26:27] Marissa: can negotiate, and I think for a lot of our colleagues as well, they’ll be grateful if we just ask the question, can we do it earlier in the day?

[00:26:36] Joel: Right,

[00:26:36] Marissa: or a different time or a different day altogether. For instance, just to share a little bit here, I have a meeting with my business coach, our business consultant, that I meet with him currently every Friday afternoon from about one to 2:00 PM Well, what it has inevitably ended up happening is I walk out of that meeting with a handful of action items, not just for myself, but for my team members.

[00:26:59] And I’m trying to wrap all that up before the weekend. And so I get out of that meeting and I go into Slack and I dump all the action items into Slack in the last hour of our workday. And one of our team members who I adore, Dave, he jokingly said to me the other day, wow, like, you’re really kind of putting me on blast right here at the end of a Friday.

[00:27:20] And he was joking and, you know, everything. But I, I had a moment of, oh my gosh, this is not a good feeling for him. And frankly, it’s not a good feeling for me because I feel frantic to try to get all that stuff out of my head or out of my planner and into Slack to where, you know, the rest of the team can take it and run with it.

[00:27:39] They can’t do anything with it on a Friday afternoon. And so rather than just continuing on and hoping something would change, I went to our business consultant and I said, Hey, would you be open to moving this meeting earlier in the week? I really don’t like how this is affecting me and my team on a Friday afternoon.

[00:27:57] Would you be willing to do this on a Tuesday? And what did he say? Sure. That actually is better, right? So it sometimes is as simple as that. And I think the overarching theme here is we have to slow down long enough to ask the questions like, is there a better or different way that we can do this? And more often than not there is,

[00:28:16] Joel: let’s just itemize what should go into a workday shutdown ritual.

[00:28:21] Marissa: Yeah. For me, typically this is looking over my task list and making sure that first and foremost I accomplished my daily big three, and if I didn’t for some reason or if there’s something I need to tie up to be able to check those off, I do that then, or. I will decide intentionally to transfer that to the next day, you know, or, or eliminate things or whatnot.

[00:28:43] For me, typically it’s checking email and slack. You know, I wanna check in with my team to make sure there’s nothing that I’ve missed or answers that they need before the end of the day or the end of the week. And it’s just kind of capturing any open loop. So I often will turn my page over in my full focus planner.

[00:28:59] To the next day and make sure I, I write down any important tasks that I know, hey, I need to do that tomorrow morning. I’ll go ahead and put that on my task list for the next day. Is there anything that you do differently, Joel?

[00:29:11] Joel: I do pretty much the same thing. I am a newly converted penitent center when it comes to Slack.

[00:29:17] I try to be in it off and on throughout the day, and. I always try to check it at the end of the day to see if there’s any final stuff I can either wrap up. Yeah. I always feel better if I do that as opposed to hoping that it’s not too bad and I can just deal with it the next day.

[00:29:32] Marissa: Yeah, because it sucks the next morning when you walk into a ton of messages or things that you should have responded to yesterday that are now irrelevant or you miss the boat on Right, because it’s now the next day.

[00:29:43] Joel: The other thing I try to do most days, and this just depends on. Honestly my energy level at the end of the day and like what else is happening as I’m trying to finish up the day, but I try to actually set up my next day in advance. So I look at my appointments, I look at what I think my big three ought to be, and I go ahead and I plan the next day.

[00:30:01] And. I find if I plan the next day, it makes it much easier to start the next day. I don’t have to think about it actually until I’m ready to start work, which means my mornings are more peaceful. Also, I just open up my planner to the day and, Hey look, I have an agenda. It’s already there.

[00:30:17] Marissa: So you plan your daily big three the day before

[00:30:20] Joel: usually.

[00:30:20] Marissa: Wow, okay. I don’t do that often enough. I think I need to be doing that more because I do think there’s a level of confidence and momentum that happens when you walk in and you already have the plan laid out versus. Checking in and we know then all the urgent stuff pops up, right? But it’s crazy and it’s like, okay, what do I actually focus on now?

[00:30:40] Joel: You know, my work is probably a little less responsive or reactive than yours is, and so I don’t know if that would work super well for you, but I think it works for me because it just gives me clarity at the end of the day, and it helps me close the loop because then it’s not a question as to what I’m gonna be thinking about tomorrow.

[00:30:57] I already kind of know it, and then I can just kind of close the book literally. On that, and then come to it tomorrow when it’s time.

[00:31:03] Marissa: I do think one thing here that can be really helpful as well in your workday, shut down and also your startup ritual when you start work, if not in the morning, make sure you do this.

[00:31:13] You know the last thing that you do, which is to check back on your weekly big three.

[00:31:17] Joel: Yeah, every day.

[00:31:18] Marissa: Keep that top of mind because otherwise the urgent stuff will crowd in and crowd out any of the important things if you’re not keeping that top of mind. So at the end of your day, just. Quickly flip back over to your weekly big three and say, Hey, am I making progress?

[00:31:34] Like am I keeping the main thing? The main thing?

[00:31:36] Joel: Totally. This is a great metric actually. I mean, it’s not exactly a metric, but it’s great feedback for how proactive you’re being versus reactive. Because if you find that your daily big three for several days in a row. Keeps on being populated by urgent stuff that does not tie back to your weekly big three.

[00:31:54] You know, that you’ve, you’re stuck in a loop that you’re gonna have to break so you can get refocused on the stuff that you know is super important

[00:32:01] Marissa: and there’s just nothing that feels worse than you get to your weekly preview, whatever day you end up doing that. And you realize you made virtually no progress right in the last week on the priorities that you laid out.

[00:32:14] Joel: That’s why it’s so important to look at that weekly big three every day. Like when you set your daily big three, it ought to be one of the first things you consider as you do that. So every day there’s a baked in review process of your weekly big three to keep it top of mind.

[00:32:28] Marissa: One of the easiest ways to do this, I’ve talked about this before on the show, is to take a Post-it note.

[00:32:34] At the beginning of the week, write down your weekly big three on it, and every single day just transfer that post-it note from one day to the next so that you’re able to keep it top of mind every single day. You never have to remember to flip back to your weekly preview. You’ve got it right there every single day, guaranteed.

[00:32:51] You’ll be way more successful accomplishing those three priorities. If you keep it visible, then if you don’t,

[00:32:57] Joel: okay. Let’s shift to another practical sort of thing, which is the transition itself.

[00:33:04] Marissa: Yeah.

[00:33:04] Joel: How do you bake in a transition period that helps you do this? Like in the old days. When, you know, we drove the horse and the buggy to the office and we sat there from nine to five.

[00:33:16] Then we got back in the horse and buggy and we went home. There was a clear transition, but these days with work in our pockets, with hours that are far more flexible and maybe we’re working from home, there isn’t necessarily a clear. Transition moment baked into the schedule.

[00:33:34] Marissa: Yeah. So I was, and this is where this whole concept of this episode came out of, um, I was recently reading the Longevity Code.

[00:33:43] Joel: Okay.

[00:33:43] Marissa: In that there is a idea or understanding that our physiological arousal, which is our stress outlast the work.

[00:33:53] Joel: Mm-hmm. Tell me about it.

[00:33:55] Marissa: Even though our work, technically our work hours, for instance, are done. Our bodies and minds don’t necessarily just immediately calm down or shut down. Right, right.

[00:34:05] Joel: We’re still in a state of arousal that we’re dragging with us.

[00:34:08] Marissa: Yes. And so, you know, if you have a habit of continuing work beyond work Right. Or staying connected. This is even probably worse for you, where it’s like your nervous system cannot get out of that probably fight or flight mode that you’ve been in for the day of just constant reaction mode.

[00:34:30] And we have to signal to our bodies and our minds not just our literal physical environment, but to our bodies and minds that we’re done with that and we’re in a different. Place a different right environment. And so we’ve got to signal this and, and for a lot of this, like you said, a lot of history, this was the commute home and for some of us that’s still true.

[00:34:54] We may be commuting home, although you may be in. Terrible traffic, and that may feel even more stressful or frustrating.

[00:35:02] Joel: It’s a great time for an audiobook novel. I’m just saying

[00:35:04] Marissa: yes, but for most of us, we need to figure out or kind of manufacture this into our Workday shutdown, some kind of transitional activity that signals to our brain and our body, Hey, the work is over and now it’s time to rest.

[00:35:22] So how do we do this?

[00:35:25] Joel: A million dollar question. It’s

[00:35:26] Marissa: a million dollar question. So I think first and foremost, we have to prioritize psychological detachment. So we have to literally stop thinking about work. This means not ruminating on things, and usually this means literally a physical reset. Okay? So moving your body in a different way, like don’t stay.

[00:35:48] Sitting at your desk or sitting in the chair that you continually sit at, you’ve got to literally move. So for me, this often looks like taking a walk. I usually get up and I try to get outside assuming the weather’s nice to move my body. This could even mean something like stretching, getting up and literally stretching your body.

[00:36:06] Maybe it’s changing your clothes, like maybe you wear certain types of clothes at the office or in air quotes at the office, right? And you wanna change into something more casual or something more comfortable immediately after work. There’s no better. To me reset than literally getting outside. Even if it is, I’m gonna go sit on my front porch and just listen to the birds or you know, have a glass of wine with my spouse, or just sit out there and just watch life.

[00:36:37] Joel: This is the answer to the, don’t think of an elephant problem if you say, don’t think about work, but there’s nothing to replace that with. No. You’re gonna think about work because it’s like, don’t think of an elephant. What’s the first thing you think about when you hear the expression? Yeah, an elephant.

[00:36:51] Elephant.

[00:36:52] Joel: So if you’re like, don’t think about work well. Okay. I’m still thinking about work. What do I replace it with?

[00:36:58] Marissa: Yeah,

[00:36:59] Joel: and you need something that can now occupy your head space so you can let your brain turn on something different.

[00:37:06] Marissa: Yeah. For some people this may look like going and doing like meditation or some kind of breath work for a few minutes.

[00:37:13] Like this doesn’t have to be a long period of time. We’re just signaling to our bodies. We’re transitioning out of work and into something else, right? The rest of our day, for instance. And so going and sitting down and doing some deep breathing for five minutes or doing a guided meditation for five or 10 minutes can be really powerful.

[00:37:33] Certainly if you can get outside, there’s a couple other resets that you can do with this that are subtle and also very impactful, which is kind of in terms of your senses. So one of my favorite things is dimming lights immediately after work, or as soon as kind of the sun starts going down, like transitioning that period into the evening.

[00:37:57] And so I go through my house and I turn off all my overhead lights. Joel, we both have these circadian light bulbs in our houses that have different settings on them, where they go from kind of more of a bright white light. To more of an ory red glow. And that’s really powerful for our eyes. It, it helps calm our senses down and signal to our bodies, Hey, it’s evening time, right?

[00:38:23] So you could do that. You could go take a bath, right? You could light a candle, you could get a warm drink, put some music on. Anything that signals from a sensory standpoint, hey, it’s a different time of day. Now we’re transitioning outta work.

[00:38:36] Joel: Okay. What about like a mental reset? I mean like we’re talking about head stuff at some level.

[00:38:43] The sensory stuff is a part of it, but there’s also like, what do you do with. All the brain activity that’s a carryover from work.

[00:38:50] Marissa: Well, I think this is your favorite thing, which is lists.

[00:38:53] Joel: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And

[00:38:55] Marissa: so sometimes it can be really helpful at the end of the day to just do a brain dump and empty out your brain on paper.

[00:39:02] You don’t need to solve anything, which can be a little bit challenging at this point, but just put that parameter on yourself. If I’m not trying to solve things, I’m just trying to empty my brain.

[00:39:12] Joel: Yeah. It does have the benefit of feeling like you’ve closed something of a loop. Just putting it into a, like an objective state on a list means, all right.

[00:39:21] I’m done with that for the moment,

[00:39:23] Marissa: and you can come back to this the next day or whenever it is appropriate to be able to revisit any of those things that are in your mind. Whether it’s things that are worrying you, it may not be like a physical task that you have to go do, but it may be something that’s concerning to you or just a, a thought that you have of, oh, I, I don’t wanna forget to tell so and so this thing, just get it out on paper so it doesn’t have to live in your head.

[00:39:46] Joel: This, by the way, works in the evening when work stuff just. Interferes, you know, like a thing pops into our head,

[00:39:53] Marissa: right?

[00:39:53] Joel: Just like write it down and then you can pick it up tomorrow morning. You don’t need to do it right now. You can come back to it in the morning.

[00:39:59] Marissa: And I think this is where it is nice to have an analog planner or piece of paper and a pen where you’re literally physically writing it out versus just putting it in like the notes app, for instance, in your phone.

[00:40:12] It doesn’t have the same effect. And I think having that. Physical manifestation of I’m taking it out of my brain and literally writing it out on paper. There’s something, I don’t know the magic of it, but there’s something that is happening. Yeah. From a physical and physiological standpoint that signals this doesn’t have to stay in my brain anymore.

[00:40:32] I’ve got it over here.

[00:40:33] Joel: Well, part of it is. It’s a user interface problem. Yeah. When you take a note inside Apple Notes, it’s more or less invisible to you, and unless you open up that same note the next day, you’re likely to forget that you ever even put it down in an Apple note. You’ll see it three weeks later when you’re kind of scrolling through your notes and go, oh crap, I forgot to talk to so-and-so about such and such.

[00:40:53] Marissa: Right.

[00:40:54] Joel: Whereas if you write it down in your planner. It’s there for you the next day and exactly the place you tend to go look for the things that you’re gonna do.

[00:41:01] Marissa: Yep.

[00:41:01] Joel: So that’s a user interface solution in which the analog beats the digital hands down.

[00:41:08] Marissa: Totally. What we’re saying here is we need to be more intentional about how we’re exiting work.

[00:41:14] It isn’t just a matter of tying up the loose ends and you know, responding to your team, which is all really important. There’s also an aspect of signaling to our brains and our bodies. We’re transitioning out of work and transitioning into the rest of our evenings or, or the rest of our days, depending on what time you’re wrapping up.

[00:41:33] So our tip of the week here are kind of, here’s what you’re gonna go do. Your action item is to figure out what your workday shut should look like. Okay. So what your workday shut down should look like.

[00:41:46] Joel: Yeah. Write it down. There’s a spot for this. In the full focus planner, you go to your rituals page.

[00:41:52] There is a workday shutdown ritual section. Yes, you just write down the list of stuff you want to do. You can put it in order or not, depending on how much jazz you like in your life, but just like get it down if you don’t have a full focus planner. I think you should correct that mistake. But if you don’t have a full focus planner, like literally just get out a piece of paper and write down what your workday shutdown ritual is gonna be.

[00:42:16] You could set an appointment for yourself on your calendar. ’cause you should schedule this. Yes, schedule it on your calendar and put the items that you’re gonna do in that workday shutdown ritual in the meeting notes or the, the appointment notes, just so you know. Okay, it’s now four 30 and I’m gonna do X, Y, z.

[00:42:33] Et cetera in order to close all the loops and be ready to shut down my day.

[00:42:37] Marissa: And this really should be simple. This shouldn’t be something that’s gonna take you an hour or two hours to accomplish. This is like you’re going through kind of a, a basic checklist and. Transitioning out, right? You’re wrapping things up and you’re transitioning out of work.

[00:42:53] Yeah, so this should not be complicated. This shouldn’t feel like something, oh my gosh, I don’t have time for this should feel completely doable within a 30 minute period of time. Put it on your calendar, like Joel said, it is, uh, to me a game changer. Having that signal that when I look at my calendar, I’m not scheduling meetings to the end of the day, and it immediately tells me, you know, I get a reminder each day that it’s like, workday shut down.

[00:43:18] And it’s like, okay, it’s time to start shutting it down. And that’s a helpful reminder. Ask yourself, you know, what would have to be true? To end work full of peace and having it completely wrapped up at five o’clock or whatever time you set. Maybe it’s earlier for you, like it is for us. It is amazing. You get some bonus points, but what would, what would that have to look like in order to do that, right, because the truth.

[00:43:47] You have a lot more agency than you think you do. It’s just about being intentional.

[00:43:52] Joel: Totally. The work never ends, but you can end the work and that’s where your agency comes in.

[00:43:57] Marissa: Absolutely.

[00:44:03] Thanks for joining us on Focus On This.

[00:44:06] Joel: This is the most productive podcast on the whole entire internet, so please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen or focus on this podcast.com,

[00:44:17] Marissa: and we will be here next week. Like Joel said, what we’re gonna be talking about.

[00:44:23] Procrastination and not in the way that you expect.

[00:44:27] Joel: If you have multi-sided dice, hint, hint, this is gonna be for you.

[00:44:31] Marissa: Oh, okay. Exciting.

[00:44:33] Joel: Until then, Dave focused.