The shutdown ritual ritual reduces chronic stress

Can you focus your attention on your life outside of work?

Work is a never-ending source of commitments. When you solve one problem, you focus your attention on the next. It is not enough to generate value once in your work, you need to generate value constantly: you need to attend to new commitments constantly.

The problem occurs when commitments accumulate as pending commitments. A pending commitment is an obligation that you have accepted but you have not yet managed (you don’t yet know if you will actually be able to fulfill it or when you will do it). Note that I say «manage» and not «fulfill». When you manage a commitment, it ceases to be something pending and becomes something that you will fulfill when the time comes.

Pending commitments feed the internal toxic dialogue. This type of dialogue is toxic, not so much because of its content, but because of its form. An example of toxic dialogue is continually thinking (and rethinking) about your pending work commitments—“Am I sure I responded to that email?”, “I can’t forget to do this”, “Does what I’m doing now make sense?”, etc.—without ever taking any action to manage them. And, as you can probably guess, toxic internal dialogue is a source of chronic work stress.

In this article, I show you Cal Newport’s shutdown ritual¹² that will allow you to:

• manage your commitments proactively
• reduce chronic work stress
• focus your full attention on your life outside of work.

Transition completely to your life outside of work

The goal of the shutdown ritual is to eliminate the toxic internal dialogue due to your work. In other words, to ensure that your mind transitions completely from being focused on your work to being focused on your life outside of work. In this way, you cut off rumination at the root, eliminating this source of chronic stress.

To accomplish this, you need to convince yourself of two things:

1. You have no pending commitments. There is nothing that you are forgetting, that you have overlooked, or that you are managing solely with your head.

2. You have a plan for the next few days. You have a reasonable plan that ensures you meet your short- and long-term commitments.

These two requirements are the guarantees you need to be able to stop the toxic dialogue. In fact, what you get is a helpful internal dialogue: “Today I have done the shutdown ritual, so I know I have answered that email, I know I am not forgetting anything and I know it makes sense what I am doing because I have a plan that I trust.” This dialogue is helpful because it prevents rumination and guides you to action.

How to do the shutdown ritual

The shutdown ritual is one of the techniques of Cal Newport’s Time Block Planner². This technique benefits from applying the other methods that Cal Newport proposes. So, I highly recommend reading the Time Block Planner and holistically applying all of its ideas.

However, I will show you below a simplified, self-contained version of the shutdown ritual so you can use it without consulting any additional material.

The ritual of shutdown ritual

When it’s the end of your work schedule, perform the following steps…

1. Review the tasks of the day. Review the tasks you have completed or that have been left unfinished that day. Decide what to do with each task. For example, perhaps you need to…

• create new tasks in response to the day’s work
• delete tasks that are no longer relevant
• move a pending task to the next day
• finish a small pending task (e.g., send an email).

2. Review the captures of the day. It is recommended to use a capture system to avoid interrupting your work every time you have an idea (or find a source of information) not related to the work you are doing at that moment. Decide what to do with each of those captures. For example, maybe you need to…

• create a task to action that capture in the future
• archive the capture where it belongs
• delete the capture if it is not really valuable.

3. Review all other sources of commitments. Review all other sources of potential commitments specific to your work. Decide what to do with each of those commitments. For example, maybe you need to…

• check your e-mail inbox
• check your calendar events
• check your work chat.

4. Empty your mind. Check that there are no commitments you are managing off the top of your head without having written them down anywhere. Decide what to do with those commitments. For example, maybe you need to…

• write it down in the form of a task or a note
• convince yourself it’s not a commitment you must keep.

5. Review your plan. Review your plan for the next few days and update it if necessary. It is not necessary to have a very detailed plan; it is enough to have a reasonable plan of how you will face the following days.

6. Record that you have completed the ritual. When you finish the ritual, record it as completed. The goal is that when you notice you start to have a toxic dialogue, you can think, “I remember completing the ritual, so I know I have done what I need to do to convince myself that everything is handled and that I can forget about the work until tomorrow”. The way to record the ritual as completed is customizable. For example:

• In my case, I write a cross in the daily log in my Bullet Journal.
• Cal Newport recommends using a personal metric or saying aloud: “Shutdown complete.”

Conclusion: A way to be more self-aware

Pending commitments are a source of chronic stress. The solution is to get into the habit of proactively managing your commitments so that they do not accumulate as pending and are simply one more thing you will do in the future when the time comes.

However, on many occasions, we are not aware of our pending commitments. We lack the necessary self-awareness to detect them in time and thus prevent them from accumulating.

The shutdown ritual is useful for both cases; it is a way to:

• improve your self-awareness to detect your commitments.
• manage your commitments proactively.

There are more tools that allow you to improve your self-awareness. For example, writing a journal, the mental inventory technique of the Bullet Journal method³ or even Tiago Forte’s own PARA method⁴.

In the same way that a tool for thinking allows us to have better ideas, a tool for self-awareness allows us to have a better life, whether it is a life with less stress, more happiness, or more meaning.

A life beyond work.

And you, what do you do when you finish work?

You can answer me in the comments or directly to this email. In both cases, I’ll get back to you :-)

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