Bookending

Here’s a small trick that worked for me over the dozen years I led remote teams: at the end of your working day, shut down every app on your machine. Yes, all of them. Stash your tabs somewhere if you must, but close them all down. The only exception that may be made is for a simple note-taking app—the kind that lacks any kind of notifications. Then, spend ten or perhaps fifteen minutes reflecting on your day, whether in said note-taking app or, even better, on paper. This needn’t be anything formal or structured, just jot a few things down—maybe short phrases, maybe just some key words. The only hard rule is to do your best to keep any sense of judgement out. Then, in the morning, when you open up your machine, there should be nothing yelling at you—no unread badges, no cluster of notifications calling for your attention. At that point, you can reverse the practice, and spend a few minutes thinking ahead to the day that you want to have, and anything you think is important to keep your attention on, even as everything and everyone else tries to drag that attention in a million other directions.

I’ve found this practice is useful on two fronts: one, it serves as a kind of bookend, starting and ending the day, so that you don’t end up working all the time, with no sense of beginning or completion. I think this is important for any work, but especially for remote work, where the environmental differences between working and not-working are wont to blur. Turning off all those apps, and spending a few minutes with pen and paper, creates an adjustment to the environment that helps bring the work day to a close in the evening, and permit it to open with a sense of calm and intention in the morning. At the same time, taking even a few minutes to reflect or contemplate helps with the inevitable overwhelm that most remote working environments generate. It gives you a place to ground yourself and return back to each day, no matter what happens in between.

You don’t have to take my word for it though. Accept it as a hypothesis, and give it a shot. Then see what happens. Whatever the results, I bet you learn something new.