More Productivity and Work-Life Balance Through a Better End-of-Work Routine

So you've gotten to the end of your workday, it's time to wrap up all of that good work that you've done. If you're anything like me, you have, you know, sticky notes all over your desk of ideas and notes to self and meeting notes. You have a bunch of different cups of half-drunk coffee and LaCroix, and it's time to move on to the rest of life, right? It's time to go be a mom, it's time to go be a friend and a wife and a daughter. And the time just passed so quickly. And it felt like, oh my gosh, wow, we're here, we're at the end, we need to move on. And like, you got to get your brain to the next part of the day. But before you can clock out, you have a few things you need to get done. And that is your end of the workday shut down routine. So I think this is the steps that you take to mentally make that transition back to the rest of your day, to the rest of life, especially important if you're raising little ones. This transition is not easy. So wrapping up your workday with purpose and intention is what I want to share with you today. So last week, we talked about starting your day with purpose and intention and creating a start of the workday routine. And now I want to talk about an equally important part, which is the wrap up. So this shift from working and being a creative into mom mode is one of the hardest shifts for me, I find it a lot easier to flip the switch of turning mode on for work and not off. I feel like there's just less friction when I'm thinking, okay, we're getting into the business versus a hard stop and saying, it's time to go focus, be present with the kids, play with them, answer tons of questions. Like Clara is in a questions phase. She's four. She's inquisitive. She's a tiny little genius. I want to be able to be have that bandwidth to be available. But I am not always great at this. And one thing that has really helped me in this area is having a end of the workday routine. And I think that this has helped me not only be more productive in business, because we're going to talk about that. Love me some productivity. But it has also helped me to separate work and life, which I know that I need. And I'm sure some of you listening do as well. So what is an end of the day routine? This is quite simply just a few tasks that you walk through after you've worked for a few hours, whether that is just a small block of time or an entire day. A lot of us I think are working part-time hours seeking full-time incomes, we need to make a couple of hours really count. We've probably made a ton of progress in a couple of hours. I know I probably get more done in three hours than I did in three days before having children, quite simply because I probably just wasn't as focused and productive as I am now. But I won't do an end of the day, end of the work time routine or shut down if I'm just checking a message from a team member, hopping to check something out during a launch or something like that. So this is really something I do during the end of a legit block of work. Okay, so let's talk about why you should have one. There is this great quote from James Clear. I love him. He's such a great author. And he says, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And I love this because goals are wonderful. And that is an imperative part of our success is setting these goals and creating goals. And that's not what we're getting into here today. But it's the routines and the systems that we set up in support of those goals that truly move us closer to reaching them. So a few reasons I started this was because when I would come back to work after some time off, sometimes I didn't even know where I'd left off. I wasn't super clear on did that brand get back to me? Have we heard back from that person? Did I respond to that inquiry? Like I can't quite remember. And sometimes there was just a lot of like open loops in my head. And especially this was a problem because I don't work on Fridays. So sometimes it can be four or more days by the time I get back to a certain project in my business because I'm only working Monday through Thursdays. And so I really noticed this is making me slower on projects, I was slower in getting back into my work, and that I needed to create some habits and some systems to really support me getting myself back in the mode of work faster, and leave myself some breadcrumbs so that when I came back, I knew what the heck was going on. But I think another reason why you will want to think about creating an end of the day and the workday wrap up is for your own mental health and for creating some work life boundary and balance. I know that for me, having a routine like this helps me to feel like work is complete in some sense. I think none of our work is ever truly complete. But you want to get to a place sometimes you're just in the middle of something and it just feels like you're so in the middle of it, that it's hard to step away, it's hard to turn it off as much as you might want to. And that's such a frustrating feeling. So for me, the goal of this is really to help myself to feel like I can take a pause from what I was working on and I can mentally move on. So let me share what my personal end of the day routine looks like at this time and then I'm going to share with you some ways for you to build your own end of the workday routine. Okay, so my end of the day routine right now is that I will take all of the notes on my desk and put them into Notion. So I love like physical papers and pens and I have a pen subscription. I'm like a huge pen nerd. I love highlighters and I find that I'm just faster at taking notes a lot of times when I'm on a call. I just have a sheet of paper. But by the end of the day, it's kind of a hot mess. So I consolidate those, I check things off and I literally just like crumple them up and it's like really satisfying and then I put them into Notion. So whatever gets to go into Notion is things that I need to remember or their tasks. Like I'm able to kind of put digitally what is just a mess on my desk. Then the next thing I'm going to do is update those tasks inside of Notion, leave any notes about projects I was working on. Like I have a workspace inside of Notion for this podcast. So once I'm finished with an episode, I will mark it as recorded. And those are the types of things that I want to do to move a project along digitally, both for myself, but also for my team to be able to see where are we at on that, like what's going on with that. And then when I get back to my desk, it's not a mystery as to exactly where I left off. So I update my project management tool and I leave a little bit of time to address any questions that people may have had for me. So like emails, team questions, Slack messages, just try to like wrap that up right at the end of the day so I can get as many of those in as possible. Then I close out every browser tab on my computer and I'll save anything. I will save it in a folder. If I need that link, I will come back to it, but I don't want anything on my computer that would tempt me to come back and check. So I close everything out. I will turn off my desk light. I will turn off the noisemaker in my office. And then I remove all the drink cups and whatever is on my desk. So I try to do like a hard reset and I turn off my computer monitor. If I'm working on a laptop, I will close the laptop. So I really am trying to tell my brain, we're done. We are done for now. And something that has helped me in this area, which I'm still working on, is I tell myself there will always be more work. And that might sound kind of like depressing, but I just have to remind myself like there is no finish line. You just need to stop. And that rest is productive. Okay. So that is my current end of a work block routine. It's very, very helpful for making sure that everything in my project management tool is reflective of what's actually happening and helps me feel like I'm not going to just run back on and check something really quick because everything's turned off. So that's really helpful. But there are a few key elements of a end of day routine. If I were to break this down into building blocks that I think will be helpful for you. So I can break this down into four categories. So as you're thinking about how you might want to wrap up your day or your work session and really close that loop and give yourself permission to go back to being a mom and back to being all the other things that you have to be in life, I want you to be thinking about these four categories. So they are the work itself, your mind, communication with others, and your workspace. So between those four categories, you will have the building blocks to build an end of day routine. So as you're thinking about this, I have a couple of suggestions or questions that you could even ask yourself that will help you to create your own. So that first question is, what did I work on that I can leave myself some notes on? That's a great way to start. Where can you leave a breadcrumb for yourself? Because what we think we're going to remember exactly where we left off with something. But a lot of times in that last five minutes of your work time, you are the clearest on what actually got done and what you need to come back to. So do your future self a favor and leave yourself some notes as to what you need to get into right away or what needs to be followed up on. The next question is, who might I need to communicate with before I clock out? Like your inbox, your team, some clients perhaps. What communication needs to happen during this wrap-up? Another task you could have on your list is to clean up your workspace, to turn off your computer, to turn off your electronics, your scene that you've set up for yourself, any kind of like headphones. You can put them on a stand and plug them in. I think these are great ways to kind of signal to your brain the work is coming to an end. It's a great wind down. And I like to think of this even as like a commute because we don't get a commute a lot of times working from home, just being creative. And as much as I love that, not having a commute, it also makes that switch to staring two kids in the face and having to figure out dinner and chores and all the things really abrupt at times. And so thinking of it in that way and thinking like, how can I make this transition feel like it actually happened instead of, wow, we're back. Okay, here we are. And it's like jarring. So once you've built out a draft of the routine that you might want to follow, I really think it would be helpful to write this ideal routine down and try it out for like a week or two. Give yourself a chance to see how it feels during a typical week and see if it's helpful or not. See, see if this actually makes you feel like you get back into work easier. See if this helps you to build out more boundaries between your work self and your personal life, your mom self, and just brings greater balance to your life. If it's not doing that, bless and release. Try something else because I am all about trying out what seems to work for someone else. And if it doesn't work for you, that is okay too. I think creating routines and habits around your business is super personal, but it's always so worth it because it's going to to ultimately be more productive, be your best self when you're a mom, be your best self when you're working. And sometimes you're doing a little bit of both at the same time, right? Because we're called to both. All right. So if you're thinking about your startup routine, go ahead and head back to last week's episode. I would love to know if these episodes were helpful for you. And if you've built your own routines, I would love to hear about them. You can share about them with me over on Instagram, in the DMs, your stories, if you'd like to tag me, or of course in our Facebook group, we have a called to both community of women who are chasing big dreams, big, ambitious dreams, and building lives with their families at the same time. So be sure to join that group. Always share what you're learning in that group. And I will see you next week. Bye guys.