Taking effective action on YOUR priorities won’t happen by accident. In fact, without a bit of planning, and some focused effort, it won’t happen at all.

I use three anchor activities in my week – the Workday Startup, the Workday Shutdown, and the Weekly Review – to keep me oriented in the right direction. This is part 2 of a 3-week series that highlights each of these “rituals.”

I fully expect your version of a Workday Shutdown to look different than mine, but here’s the goal: your Workday Shutdown should help you close out your workdays with a consistent set of activities that help you assess your progress, collect any “open loops,” organize tomorrow’s work.

Having a set of consistent “shutdown” activities gives you a cue that you are about to STOP working. This has been incredibly important to me since I started working from home, but it has merit wherever your workday ends. The idea is simple: these activities allow me to tie a neat bow on the work at hand and shift to the next phase of my day.

The Workday Shutdown is literally on my calendar for the last 30-minutes of  my workday and the calendar entry includes a link to the Google Doc that acts as my repeating agenda. At some point you memorize the agenda, but I open the Google Doc anyway because it’s easier to skip the hard parts if I don’t have a checklist staring me in the face.

Here’s what I do to end every workday:

Finalize client notes. I wrap up any notes from client calls because I will forget important details if I don’t. It has to be done before my workday ends.

Reschedule any work that I wasn’t able to complete. Sometimes something unexpected happens and I choose to alter my plans to incorporate it into my day. For example, moving the 10” of snow we received overnight is suddenly a major priority for me. Sometimes the thing I was working on takes significantly longer than I predicted. In any case, I review my progress and determine what needs more attention. Some of that will be reallocated on my calendar for the current week, and some will be added back into my action lists for scheduling at a later date.

Capture open loops. This can be as simple as emptying my pockets and reviewing any notes or business cards I’ve collected throughout my day. The idea is to ensure that I capture anything that requires follow up before I forget about it or lose valuable context. To whom do I owe a call or text? Did I talk to anyone today that could use my services? What do I want to do about that? Did I work on anything today that someone else on my team needs to know about?

Assess my progress. As I consider what I did (and didn’t do) throughout the day I am asking myself what worked? and what didn’t work? This isn’t a time of rigid judgment, but a time of detached assessment. The goal is always to determine how I can get more of the best parts and less of the parts that weren’t effective. This is me putting on my white lab coat and analyzing what I can learn from today that will make me better tomorrow.

Review and respond to any messages. I check my email, slack, and text messages, replying to any that need a response before I turn it all off for the evening. This is also a great opportunity to delegate work out to my assistant or other members of my team. 

Reset my workspace. The last thing I do is a quick cleanup of my workspace. I leave it in the state that I want to find it in when I return tomorrow. Ready for me to dive in. Sometimes it’s just a matter of straightening up, other times it’s an opportunity to leave myself a note to prime my progress tomorrow.

Your routine is going to look different, but I challenge you to consider how a block of time designed to help you gracefully exit your workday with purpose could change the game for you. What activities would help you close the books on work knowing that nothing is left hanging and you are primed for success in the morning?

What is one thing you would do in a Workday Shutdown?

Next week we will dive into the Weekly Review routine that helps me close my week out with a sense of completion…and set myself up for the next week of effective progress.The new year is right around the corner and I want you to start 2025 with complete clarity about how you want your business to work for you. Grab my new PDF, 3 Questions Every Small Business Owner Should Answer Before The End of the Year, and you’ll not only be primed to clarify how to get more of what you want from your business, but you’ll have a chance to grab 90-minutes of free coaching with me.