Why your brain never clocks off after work
Readtime: 3 minutes
I used to leave the office and spend the whole Tube ride home on email.
By the time I got through the front door my brain was completely fried.
I assumed I was just tired. I’d done a long day, I’d been in back-to-back meetings, so of course I was tired.
But that wasn’t the full story.
Because the fried feeling didn’t really match the intensity of the work I’d done.
On some of my most intense days, I felt great. I found it easy to switch-off in the evening and I could sleep easily.
And on some of the lighter days I struggled to stop thinking about work when I did eventually get home, and I’d often wake up at night thinking about work too.
And on the weekends I was often thinking about Monday.
How much work I’d done didn’t seem to be a factor in how I was feeling.
Something else was going on. And it was about what I was doing at the end of the workday.
Open loops
Your brain doesn’t clock off when you do.
There’s a thing psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect. Your brain keeps every unfinished task active until something tells it the task is closed.
It doesn’t matter that you’ve walked out of the office. Or that you’re now trying to watch TV or have dinner with your family.
Those loops stay open and keep firing in the background.
You think you’ve switched off, but your brain is still on the clock.
It shows up in all the familiar places. The idea that pops into your head at 3am about something you should have said in yesterday’s meeting. Or the Sunday evening where you’re suddenly thinking about Tuesday’s board paper, even though you’d sat down to watch a film.
The effect itself is pretty neutral. It’s the same thing that lets you hold a complicated client situation in your head over several weeks, and come back to it on Monday morning without losing the thread.
It can be incredibly useful when you want it to be. But it can be exhausting when you don’t.
The worst thing to do with your last 5 minutes of the day
Most senior people I know give the last 5 minutes of their workday to their inbox.
One more reply, a quick look at Teams, a final scan of what’s come in since the last meeting.
Which is probably the worst possible use of those 5 minutes.
Because every email or message you read opens more loops than it closes. Your brain ends up with a fresh set of unfinished things to chew on all evening, right when you’re trying to switch off.
For years, my end-of-day looked exactly like this. I’d clear whatever I could before leaving the office, pick up more on the Tube, and often end up doing one final check before bed.
I thought I was being on top of things.
But most of the time, I was just opening more loops, and that was impacting my sleep.
What to do instead
Here’s what works for me.
For 5 minutes at the end of each workday, write down the next step on every significant open piece of work.
The “next step” bit is what matters. I mean the single thing that will move each piece of work forward tomorrow. One line per piece.
That way your brain knows the thing will be handled tomorrow, and it can stop rehearsing it tonight.
Once the thing is written down, your brain stops carrying it around. The list is holding it for you now.
And there’s a side-effect I didn’t expect. You sit down at your desk the next morning knowing exactly what to start with, because it’s the list from the evening before.
Some days, if I’m not sure what the next step is on something, I just write down “work out what to do with X” and that seems to do the trick too.
But I think specificity on the next step is better.
Most people give their last 5 minutes of their workday to their inbox. Try this, and give your last 5 minutes to allowing you to switch off.
If you give it a try, I’d love to hear how you get on.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn
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