Dr. Cal Newport

So you got to make sure this is like a review type period.

Let me look back at my inbox and look at my plan.

Let me look at my time block and my calendar.

Really make sure there's nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that I didn't.

And there's nothing that's just in my head.

That I don't want to forget.

That's not written down somewhere.

Like take care of all of that, right?

So you review all these things.

You get what am I going to do tomorrow?

You don't have to build your whole plan for tomorrow.

You have a sense for it.

And then you need some sort of demonstrative thing you do to indicate that you finished a routine, right?

So my longtime newsletter readers know I used to actually have a phrase.

I would say schedule shutdown complete.

Like a crazy phrase, right?

It's not how normal people talk, right?

Now I have a planner that has like a checkbox that says shut down complete next to it.

The reason why that is a demonstrative anchor is that you use this then for cognitive behavioral therapy because at first people have a hard time shutting down work.

I mean I invented this because I had a very hard time shutting down working on my dissertation.