Lessons - Why You Need a Shutdown Ritual: The Power of Separating Work and Personal Life

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode we'll feature concise and insightful actionable conversations and tactics, providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. The power of shutdown rituals, when you work hard, you work hard, and when you're done, you can be done. Hey, my name is Scott, and today I'm going to be teaching you about the power of shutdown rituals and why you actually have to build them into your life. So let me ask you a question. Do you have a clean break from work at the end of every single day? Or, which I think is going to be the answer for most of us, does your work life tend to bleed into your personal life, creating a sense of never-ending stress? How beautiful, right? This is the reality for most people, especially in 2023. If this is true, if your work life bleeds into your personal life, it's time to start practicing shutdown rituals. My last video I put out, I was speaking about the importance of getting proper rest. And I thought that it would be really good to go into a really great tool called the Power Down Ritual. If you're a fan of Cal Newport, it's been called the shutdown ritual before. If you felt slightly called out by some of my previous videos and content about shutting down and getting rest and want to work on separating your work and personal life, this is what we're actually going to speak about today. So let's unpack what it means to power down. What are we talking about? End of the day habits. Here's a question. How easily can you separate your work hours from your personal hours? For example, maybe you've got a standard nine to five job and your work computer never comes home with you. Great. Lucky for you. If you're an entrepreneur or your business owner and a lot of the people that are listening to this are that, I'm guessing that is not the case. And let's be honest, if you're running a company, it's a sure fire way to blur the lines between you're working your personal life. You're literally responsible for every single aspect of your business. It is your child, the lifeblood of your future. So no wonder it's hard to put down the computer or the phone and walk away. The result is an endless stream of residual stress that can cause major burnout with no start, nend time, your life feels like one giant work day with intermittent breaks. So it's no wonder that work from home employees report higher burnout rates than those who work in an office. You literally never leave the workplace. It's all too easy to forget where your work ends and your life begins. Now, this is where the power of rituals comes in. By now, I'm sure you've read or heard about atomic habits by James Clearitz behind me if you haven't, you should pick it up. But if not, it doesn't really matter because the message is very simple. Object building is one of the most powerful tools you'll ever use for personal and professional growth. Now in my experience, the best habits are those that signify different phases of the day. For example, when I wake up and get straight into my workout clothes, my brain knows that I'm about to work out and enter the energetic alert phase of my morning. If I want to brew a calming tea every night before bed, symbolizing the onset of relaxation and sleep. At the end of my work day, I power down my laptop, I physically close it and set myself to an active on my phone, do not disturb, let my colleagues know that I'm done for the day. These habits aren't anything crazy, but they break up the day into distinct phases so that my mind is always on the same page as my daily schedule. Now my end of work day habit is actually an example of a shutdown ritual. So let's zoom in on that one. In the book called Deep Work, Cal Newport's book, Cal famously said, when you work hard, you work hard and when you're done, you can be done. That's the intention behind the concept of a shutdown ritual. To completely separate your work life from your free time, here's what Cal's own shutdown ritual looks like. He updates a master task list, collated list of immediate and long term tasks. He reviews task lists and sets complete chin dates for urgent tasks. He peruses the calendar to see what appointments are coming up in the next two weeks. He reads through the current weekly plan to ensure that everything is on track and after all of that, he shuts down his computer and walks away, putting work out of his mind until the next day. The idea of a ritual like this isn't just to tell you to bring the work days over, it's to ensure that nothing remains on your mind after hours. To answer every question, tie up loose ends, resolve anything that would prevent your mind from fully resting. The reality is, is that you can never properly rest if you're thinking about work. And why is this? Well, employment is directly tied to your livelihood. It is incompatible with relaxation. A shutdown ritual allows you to make a clean break from work allowing your mind and your body to fully rest. Now, you may be asking yourself, do I even need a shutdown ritual? Do I? I'm fine. I can leave my computer and I do refuse to respond to emails after hours, but once in a while, like, work creeps in, but it's not ruining my life. I'm going to make an argument that just refusing to respond to emails or just leaving the computer at work, sometimes that's not enough because you're not working after hours doesn't mean that you're not thinking about work after hours. So you might still be worrying about stressing over all the tasks and things that you didn't get done. A ritual helps consolidate your thoughts. You leave work with total awareness of what needs to be done, and you can rest easy knowing that it's all written down and filed appropriately for when you actually have to go into it. If you are wondering right now whether or not it's time to actually set up your own shutdown ritual, here are signs that you can look for that you're working your personal life needs separation. You're irritable, overly emotional, easily overwhelmed. You feel tense anxious when you think about work. It feels like you never have time to get through your task list. You might feel guilty. You're taking time away from work. You might recognize these symptoms of burnout and left unattended burnout can actually derail your career. So a shutdown ritual is one way to make sure that doesn't happen and how do you actually create one? Well, let's go back to Calis ritual. It's an excellent example of a shutdown ritual, but the best rituals are tailored to your specific needs. So if you actually rewind this and go watch and listen to Calis, some of those things are going to resonate with you. Some of those things are not going to resonate with you, but you have to ask yourself the key questions that let you form one yourself. So first question you ask yourself is what work related tasks and events keep you up at night? You ask this question, talking about the tasks and to-dos that linger in your mind after leaving work. For example, some people spend all night drafting emails in their head if they don't get them sent during the day. There is feel overwhelmed by the workload if they don't write or review their to-do list. And then you ask yourself the next question. What can you do to put those thoughts to rest? And I want to be clear that the point of a shutdown ritual is not to get everything done, but to rest easy knowing that all tasks are accounted for. You might not have time every afternoon to write and send all your pending emails or tick off all the tasks under to-do list, but you can write everything down and leave work with a clear plan for the next day. Third question you should ask yourself is what would this look like as a ritual? So now that you know what tasks and thoughts need to be addressed, it's time to turn them into a ritual, for example. If your shutdown ritual focuses on follow-up correspondence, it might look something like this. Spend 10 minutes writing and responding to emails. Write a quick to-do list for the next day, including any tasks you weren't able to finish today. Scan your calendar for upcoming appointments and deadlines. Take five minutes of quiet time before leaving work. Use the time to reflect on your day, reset your mindset. I personally would do a symbolic element, add a symbolic element in like powering down a laptop, turning off the lights. It serves as a tangible reminder that I'm leaving work for the day and entering relaxation mode. Then you're like, hey Scott, I'm working from home. And work from homeers need a shutdown ritual for sure, even more than office people. The boundaries between work and home are often blurred, actually scratch that. They're blurred by default. And you need to go out of your way to create a clear break between your work and your home life. Shutdown ritual is a perfect way to do this. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It could be something as simple as taking 10 minutes to journal about your day, followed by light stretching or meditation. Maybe it's like going to the gym at the end of your day to mark that transition. Anything that helps you disconnect from work and transition into a relaxation mode is fair game. I would warn against keeping the ritual too simple, like the point is to resolve all loose ends so that you can completely relax that worrying about tomorrow's tasks. Maybe doing yoga is not enough to achieve this. Maybe it's perfect. Maybe just shutting off the lights and closing your office door isn't enough to achieve this. So you have to think about what's right for you, but have something. And then you're going to follow up well, if I have this shutdown ritual and I've completely removed myself from work, is work going to suffer, is business going to suffer. And this is for entrepreneurial people like myself, by the way, at the time when I do these videos, I'm talking to myself and giving advice to myself. So I know it's not easy. And for entrepreneurial people, I know that you're maybe you're watching this thinking I should do this and then you're like, but then, but then there's always butts, right? I want to assure you that taking breaks is okay and it's not just okay, it's absolutely essential for long term success. It will always be tempting to remain on call 24 seven. No one can sustain that lifestyle forever. Shut down rituals as an entrepreneur, require a bit more preparation because you're so emotionally involved in the business and you'd be supported by a culture of delegation. Otherwise, you're never going to feel confident stepping away for the evening and letting other people handle things. Trust me when I say the carving of time for yourself becomes less possible as time goes on. And if you aren't disciplined from the very beginning of your startup, it will be impossible to practice self care and meaning. So you set a precedent by making yourself completely unreachable after certain hours. Don't give anyone the impression that you're the on call CEO. Make it part of your culture to leave work on time and honor your shutdown ritual. The best example of this I could ever think of in my life has been a CEO who was always on all the time and then he hired an incredible COO that created an escalation process because the product we were selling was mission critical, the businesses, it was a technology product. And if it went out, it would really, really impact businesses in a major way. So he was concerned that if you can't take a phone call, it's something's out. That's a big deal. People are going to lose a lot of money. A lot of customers are going to be angry. But he set up an escalation process and there was three people that were hired to be alive when he was not live to support that call before it got to him. And I can count on less than one hand how many times it actually went through three levels of technical support and very, very smart and sophisticated people so that it would ever get to him and it never had to. So this is where there can be delegation and support to tie into a proper shutdown ritual. I want to take away from all of this. shutdown rituals are an incredibly powerful tool. They improve productivity, they reduce stress, they create a healthy balance between work and home life, they can also be an important part of maintaining mental health as an entrepreneur or somebody's working remote. Start by identifying the tasks to keep you up at night, create a ritual that puts those thoughts to rest, whether it's 10 minutes of correspondence or consolidation of your to-do list, it's important to make sure that your ritual is tailored to your specific needs. If you have a ritual and you know you're part of a community of entrepreneurs and people that are trying to perform better and upskilled by watching this video, leave it in the comments below. Share your stories or if you haven't got a ritual yet, take this as your sign to go create one because I am a firm believer this will help you in your personal and professional life. If you enjoyed this video, if you're watching on YouTube, please like, comment, subscribe, hit all the buttons for YouTube. And then if you're listening to this via podcast, share this with somebody who'd find it valuable and always open the topics, give me some feedback as to what you want to hear about next.