The End-of-Day Shutdown in ADHD

I get into bed and my mind starts its shift at exactly that moment. Don't forget this tomorrow. You didn't answer that message. That task was left half done.

The day looks over but has not been closed. For a long time the difference between the two was invisible to me; I took turning off the computer to be ending the day.

Then I noticed this: ending the day is also a task, and I was never doing it.

The matter of the unclosed loop

An unfinished task keeps taking up room in the mind. The study by Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) shows a very useful detail here: you do not have to finish the task. Making a concrete plan for when and how it will be done markedly reduces the preoccupation that the unfinished task creates in the mind.

So "I'll deal with it tomorrow" is not enough; "tomorrow at ten I will open that file" is enough.

The whole logic of the end-of-day shutdown stands here. In the glossary it appears as an unclosed loop, and in ADHD the number of these loops is high, because the number of tasks left half done is high.

The day does not end by itself. When it is not finished, it continues into the night.

The four-item shutdown

The shutdown being short is the heart of it. The moment it goes past fifteen minutes, it turns into a ritual that does not get done; I tried this three times and it collapsed in the same place all three times.

1. Clear the surfaces. Desk, counter, entryway. You do not need to put everything in its place; clearing the horizontal surfaces is enough. Waking up to a clean surface reduces the first resistance of the day. When I sit down at a messy desk, I have to tidy it before starting work, and that tidying often takes the place of the work.

2. Physically prepare tomorrow. Bag, clothes, keys. Most of the decisions to be made in the morning are wiped out here. The place where I lost the most time in the mornings was deciding, not doing. A decision made in the evening and a decision made in the morning are not the same decision: in the evening I have time, in the morning I do not.

3. Write tomorrow's first task. Not the list, only the first task. A single sentence and very concrete. Instead of "report," "open the report file and read the introduction paragraph." In the morning I look at that sentence and start; I do not spend time thinking about what to do. I think this item gives back the most of the four; even on days when I skip the other three and do only this one, it is noticeable in the morning.

4. Empty your mind. Writing down somewhere whatever is circling in your head. It does not need to be in order. Brain dump takes two minutes here, and for me it visibly shortens the time to fall asleep.

Actually being able to do the shutdown

Use a fixed cue. A certain hour, an alarm or an event: starting the dishwasher, dimming the lights. This is what Wood and Rünger (2016) emphasize in their habit framework: tying the behavior to a context makes it repeatable.

Make the screen part of the shutdown. Plugging the phone in to charge in another room can be the last step of the shutdown. This one movement is among the most concrete things that reduce revenge bedtime procrastination.

Do not try to do it perfectly. The moment the shutdown turns into a cleaning session, it does not get done again. The aim is not to establish order; it is to close the day. Every time I missed this distinction the shutdown took an hour and the next day I did not do it at all.

Set up the shutdown like a favor to yourself. Let there be something small and fixed at the end of the shutdown: a cup of tea, three pages of a book, the same song. If there is something to look forward to at the end of a ritual, the ritual gets done more. Mine is music; when that song starts playing, the day has really ended.

Why a shutdown postponed to the night does not work

In ADHD the evening hours are usually the interval when the mind is most alive. The review by Kooij and Bijlenga (2013) shows that a delayed sleep phase is common in adult ADHD.

This can be a productive time, and it can also be something that keeps postponing the shutdown. The hours that pass with "just a bit more" become the next day's bill. In my case, combined with the fact that the night is when my best ideas come, this becomes a complete trap: I do not want to stop, because at last I am working well.

That is why not putting the shutdown at a late hour matters. A shutdown done close to bedtime turns into a task that delays sleep. I covered this picture in detail in the article on ADHD and sleep.

Leaving work and shutting down are not the same

I need to make one more distinction.

Turning off the computer is a physical movement. The mind leaving work is a separate process, and it does not happen by itself. If for an hour after shutting down I am still wandering around inside that work, my evening does not belong to me.

This was the most useful side of the shutdown list for me. When I finish the four items, I give my mind a signal: it ends here. When there is no signal, the work follows me until midnight; I wrote the details of that state in the article on not being able to switch off after work.

What changed after the shutdown

Describing this like a method article is easy, but what I really want to describe is what changed.

Mornings got shorter. I used to spend about an hour after getting up pulling myself together. It turns out most of that hour went on deciding: what will I wear, where is the bag, what comes first today. When all of these decisions are moved to the previous evening, the morning is only carrying out.

Nights got quieter. Putting the list circling in my mind onto paper stops that list from circling. On some nights it still circles, but it has become less frequent, and the difference is felt in the time it takes me to fall asleep.

I do not wake up in debt to the next day. When the shutdown is not done, yesterday's unfinished things arrive the moment I open my eyes. When it is done, the morning starts like a blank page; the tasks are still there, but they are on the list, not in my head.

The most unexpected gain was the evening itself. When there is a signal that the work is finished, what I do in the rest of the evening is really resting. I used to have a task list running in the background even while watching a series.

None of these four things is a big change. But when they came together they changed my week, and the cost is fifteen minutes a day.

The days you miss

I cannot do it every evening, and I have stopped seeing this as a problem.

On a tired evening, instead of doing all four items, I do only the third: writing tomorrow's first task. One sentence. Thirty seconds.

That one sentence does perhaps half the work of the four items, and it is much more likely to be done. Having a small version of the system is better than having no system at all.

I described the morning side in the article on the morning routine and the weekly upkeep in the article on the weekly review. The three work together; the one that gives back the most on its own is the fifteen minutes done in the evening.