I have a confession, for the past year I’ve fallen asleep every night with my right AirPod playing the unsoothing sounds of LitRPG audiobooks. Dungeon Crawler Carl screaming at Princess Donut as a lullaby? Apparently, those world ending stories are less stimulating than my day ending thoughts. My brain doesn’t have an easy off button, so I do my best to hack one.
Chances are you’re reading this on a device that also lacks an obvious off. That’s by design. Steve Jobs admitted to his biographer that his beliefs on the afterlife are maybe why he didn’t build off switches onto Apple devices. Think about that for ten seconds, the screens we’re glued to for all our working hours are intended to stay on, all the time. It takes deliberate intention and action to peel away and fade those screens to black.
Those same devices give us the option of where to do our work. Many of us choose to do at least some of our work at home. The always-on devices are the gateway to being always-on workers. You’d think that with the ability to end the day at any time it would be easy to do it. The opposite is true. The boundaries that used to separate work from home have completely blurred. It’s even worse for those who work for companies demanding a 996 schedule (9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days per week). I don’t know how those poor souls manage to ever unplug.
It's weirdly funny that the most popular fix for a workday that won't end is something productivity writer Cal Newport calls a "shutdown ritual." You review your task list, you make sure everything unfinished has a home for tomorrow, and then you close the laptop and say a phrase out loud to tell your own brain the day is over. Newport's personal phrase is, "Schedule shutdown, complete."
We had to invent a ceremony to force the thing the machine was deliberately designed not to do. That’s either inane or insane, likely a bunch of both.
I get why it works for some people, but it’s also not foolproof. Habits are powerful and once we form them, it’s hard to change them. In “The Power of Habit” Charles Duhigg introduced us to The Habit Loop. The loop requires three components, cue (the trigger to start doing the things), routine (the to-do list), and reward (what you give yourself for checking off the list). The Newport Ritual has a strong to-do list, but a weak cue and unclear rewards.
I’m attempting to solve those last two with my soap bar. It’s both a cue and a reward. The cue is the name of the bar, 21:00. The name is in military time as a nod to discipline. It’s 9:00 PM for us civvies and it’s the timestamp that explicitly says when it’s time to recharge. I’m literally stamping 21:00 right on the bar. It’s prescriptive and that’s the point. Maybe your 9:00 PM is more like 9:45, that’s ok, you’ll know your bar will be ready at your personal 21:00.
The reward is sensory. Every time you smell the cacao and the thick lather touches your skin, you’ll know the grind is over and you can turn off the day. Tomorrow, it starts again.
My hope is that this bar will solve the workday disconnect problem as effectively as hearing a narrator scream, “damn it Donut!” puts me to sleep.
What’s your cue to shut down?
Disclosure: I write these posts. AI helps me edit them.