How can you end the day on a good note and set yourself up for success the following day?
Paddy talks through the benefits of a shutdown routine and shares some examples of his own shutdown routine.
Video transcript
So as a manager and a leader, we use up a lot of mental energy in our jobs every single day. The problem is that mental energy is only finite. We’ve only got so much room we can use before we need to recharge it. So if you’ve had a particularly busy day, you’ve had some difficult meetings and challenging conversations and difficult work to do.
You will have used up quite a lot of mental energy during that time, and we need to be able to recharge our energy in order to be able to do our most effective work the following day. The problem is when a lot of us switch off from work in the evenings and close our laptop and start getting some food or going for a drink, we don’t actually recharge our energy because our minds are still thinking about work. We haven’t switched off completely and therefore I’m still very active when it comes to work. That means that we don’t recharge the energy that we need to go again the following day and be as effective.
The following day. That’s what we need is what’s called a shutdown routine. A shutdown routine gives us a physical prompt to be able to say, OK, work is now starting to finish. I’m starting my personal evening time and allows our brains to actually know, OK, it’s time to relax now, time to switch off, and therefore time to recharge.
So a shutdown routine gives you physical prompts to be able to do that. I’m going to show you my shutdown routine and the habits that I’ve developed to help me. It should give you some inspiration and show exactly how it works.
