Mornings startups and Shutdown routines

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? Okay. So this morning, uh, when I woke up, I had a really interesting conversation with my spouse about dreams, and something that one of us said, I don't know who said it, but one of us said something about a browser with a lot of tabs open in reference to dreams, and it got me thinking on a tangent about startup routines and shutdown routines.

[00:00:43] This concept of startup routine and shutdown routine kind of comes from programming, but I think it works really well when it, when you talk about like your day. So I like to track my time. I started doing it when I first began freelancing to understand where my time was [00:01:00] going, and I kind of started doing it for almost everything that I do that isn't just for fun.

[00:01:05] So like my side hustles, when I'm working on this podcast, you know, when I'm working, like to pay the bills, all of that stuff. And the first entry you're gonna see my time tracker almost every single day is something called Morning Startup. Now, sometimes morning startup is five minutes and sometimes morning startup is 45 minutes.

[00:01:26] What does that mean? It means a few different things. I look at all my tasks of the day and my emails and you know, whatever I might have left over from last night, last time I worked, and I figure out what my day's gonna be like. I leave room for reactionary work, and I leave room for deep work, something we talked about in a previous episode, and this allows me to be really intentional and plan sort of how I wanna deal with my day.

[00:01:59] It gets [00:02:00] me in the right mindset, puts me in the right attitude. Similarly, when I finish my workday, I go into something called shutdown routine. Now, I don't always track that, but I do DO a shutdown routine because I found that when you don't do and you leave all of your work open, the next time you come to your machine for whatever reason,

[00:02:22] And if you work remotely, it might be not for work that you come to your machine the next time. Um, you are confronted with all of this other stuff that you were working on, and instead of being in fun mode or home mode or family mode, a part of your brain goes back into work mode, and that's not great. That's not nice.

[00:02:44] You are now taking away from the other important times in your day and putting part of your brain back into work mode. It is not fun to come to your computer and be confronted with the in-progress work of last time you were working, [00:03:00] whether that is in the morning when you're starting up work again, or whether you came to your machine because you wanted to print out a PDF form for your spouse.

[00:03:11] So it's very important, I think, in order to be able to focus very deeply on the parts of your life that are not work when it's time to focus on them, to do a shutdown routine because not only does a shutdown routine allow you to like literally shut down all the apps for work on your computer, it also lets you make a plan.

[00:03:33] Okay, here is the stuff I did today. Here's the stuff that's still left to do. You put it on your list, it's out of your head, it's on paper. When you do your morning startup, the next time you're at work, you can look at that list and you can handle it. Downloading things off of your brain, off of like.

[00:03:51] this mental space that you have and putting it somewhere concrete that you know you can look back at so you don't have to worry about it or keep trying to remind yourself about it. [00:04:00] That will relieve like a lot of subconscious, unconscious, back of the mind stress because I don't know about you, but there are so many days when I find myself thinking about something again and again and again and again and again, and I'm doing it so that I don't forget it.

[00:04:17] But if I just wrote it down on paper somewhere that I know, I always look, so in my case, I have a bullet journal. If I wrote it down there, then I free up some brain space, free up some of that RAM of my computer, my brain's memory so that I can, I don't know, live my life a little more freely, a little more easily.

[00:04:39] So you know. Morning routines, morning startups, and shut down routines. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.