While working from home as a business owner has a lot of great upsides, the big downside is that there’s no natural “end” to the workday. There’s always something else to finish, or one more thing to review to make sure you’re on track.
You break for lunch and go back to work. Then you break for dinner… and go back to work again, because there are so many open loops in your head about client projects. So many things you have to “just do real quick,” because otherwise you’ll forget.
So how do you end your workday when you work from home? It turns out the answer has less to do with willpower and more to do with where those open loops live.
The Science of the Mental Load
If you’ve ever had a million things running around in your head, you know how exhausting open loops are. Relying on memory alone to make sure nothing slips is draining, and researchers have found that the fix is surprisingly simple.
In 2011, Masicampo & Baumeister studied what happens when people have unfinished goals on their minds. Those goals kept intruding: minds wandered and focus suffered. The surprising part was what made it stop. People didn’t have to finish the tasks. They just needed a concrete plan for when and how they would.
Even writing things down helps on its own. In 2018, Scullin et al. found that people who wrote a to-do list before bed fell asleep faster than people who wrote about what they’d already finished. No plan required.
But there’s a catch: your brain only lets go if it trusts where you put things. Storm & Stone (2015) found that offloading information freed up memory only when people could count on it being there later. When the system wasn’t reliable, the brain kept holding on.
So based on the research, fully offloading the mental load takes three things:
- Write it down: get it out of your head.
- Schedule it: give it a concrete “when.”
- Trust the system: keep one reliable place you actually review.
Miss any one of them and the loops creep back in.
I’ve been practicing this for decades. The system itself has changed over the years, but I noticed the effect on my mental health right away. Being able to walk away from the computer and actually live (go to a museum, hang out with family and friends, plan a trip) without work hovering in the background became one of my superpowers. I could work, and then I could turn off work brain.
Deciding: What Does “Done” Look Like?
But to truly turn off work brain, you have to know when you’re done. Most people decide what each day’s “done” looks like at one of two moments: the end of the workday before, or the start of the day itself. Neither is better; it comes down to personality. Decide at the end of the day, and you’re looking ahead to tomorrow, making sure everything is scheduled and fits. Decide at the start, and you review what needs to happen each morning before you dive in.
Personally, I’ve always loved the morning version. My days can look drastically different from one to the next, so each morning I set my schedule and confirm my projects for that day. On Mondays, I take a few extra minutes to make sure the whole week is balanced.
Build the Day’s List from Your Deadlines, Not Your Inbox
Whichever time you choose, what you review matters just as much as when. And for a lot of us, the default is the inbox.
We’ve all done it: used the inbox as the day’s checklist. But it’s exhausting to make sure nothing gets buried in email. And what happens when a client doesn’t write back? Nothing in your inbox reminds you to follow up. A silent thread is an open loop with no reminder attached.
A separate system outside your inbox keeps everything in one primary place, and it protects you from getting pulled off course by every email ping. Your deadlines, not the latest message, decide the day’s list.
A Five-Minute Shutdown Routine
With everything in one place you trust, ending the day comes naturally. My shutdown routine:
- A quick email check to make sure nothing is an emergency.
- A look at the day’s tasks to confirm they’re finished.
- A glance at what I’m doing tomorrow.
That’s it. It takes moments, but it tells your brain, the one that’s been holding all those loops, that it can stop thinking about work.
What to Do When You Don’t Finish the Day’s Plan
Of course not every day goes to plan. Sometimes the day ends and you just didn’t fit everything in. Does that mean the system is broken?
Not at all. Remember the research: the relief comes from having a plan, not from finishing. An unfinished task with a new date is still a closed loop. What matters is that rescheduling is easy, so a disappointing day becomes a quick fix instead of an evening of worrying.
Then close the laptop. Tomorrow is already handled. Go enjoy your dinner, and this time, don’t go back to work after it.