The Best Way to End Your Workday

Fully half of U.S. workers are now experiencing burnout (feelings of exhaustion, ennui, and negativity toward one’s occupation, overall symptoms of depression and anxiety). The rise of remote work, mobile email, and other technologies has made it difficult to disconnect but doing so has become more important than ever. Creating rituals that help you disengage from work so you can fully savor your free time is key. Author Markham Heid reviews current research and offers recommendations which include:

  • Finding and scheduling 30 minutes in the morning to write replies to E-mails that came in at the end of the previous day as you were preparing to wrap-up. Rather than just letting them linger, you have created a specific task for the next day and, in doing so, swapped out something your brain one categorize as n unfinished task for one that your brain can mark as “handled.”
  • Knocking out simple, completable tasks at the end of the workday — and avoiding complicated ones — is another good way to psychologically disconnect.
  • Don’t make checking (or worse, organizing) your inbox the last thing you do each day. “In terms of detachment, checking email is really a no-win scenario,” psychologist Brandon Smit says. “If there is nothing to attend to in your inbox, checking email was a small waste of time. If there is something urgent, a new task has now been activated in your mind, which will press for completion.”

You can read Markham Heid full article, “The Best Way to End Your Workday” at https://elemental.medium.com/the-best-way-to-end-your-workday-c91caf4677d5.