108 - 5 Tips to Shut Down from Your Work Day
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Summary
In this episode, we’re chatting tips for high achievers to disconnect from work. Because I KNOW how tough that is for high-achievers to do. Whether you work from home or you’re just continuing the corporate hustle at home at the end of your day, I’ve got 5 tips that I hope will resonate with you!
Takeaways
Create a dedicated workspace to separate work and personal life.
Maintain a regular schedule to set expectations and boundaries.
Set clear boundaries and leverage technology to support them.
Have a mindful transition or shutdown routine at the end of the workday.
Take decompression time to rest and reset.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:48 Disconnecting from Work
02:16 Tip 1: Create a Dedicated Workspace
02:40 Visual Separation
03:09 Tip 2: Maintain a Regular Schedule
05:00 Tip 3: Set Boundaries
06:19 Leverage Technology
07:12 Tip 4: Have a Mindful Transition
08:56 Tip 5: Take Decompression Time
Resources
Check out the Burnout-Proof Members Club for support in building your shut-down routine!
Do you have anything to add?
Drop a comment below…
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ellyn Schinke (00:15.81)
Hey there, achiever, and welcome back to the Burnout Proof Podcast, where we're all about helping you build the mindsets, habits, and behaviors to burnout proof your life. My name is Ellen, and if you are a busy, overwhelmed Enneagram 3 achiever like I was, who's sick and tired of letting work run your life, you are in the right place, my friend. Here on Burnout Proof, I'm committed to giving you simple, low BS episodes that help you work less, live more, feel from your hustle, and take back your life from burnout.
Let's do this.
Hello, my friend and welcome back to another episode of The Burnout Proof Podcast. Today, we are talking about something that I feel like I get asked a lot in speaking gigs. And I know if you're a high achiever, it is so, so hard to do and that is all about disconnecting from work. I'm going to give you 5 tips to help high achievers like us, like you and I, disconnect from work. These are things that I've been playing around with, some things that I've been trying, some things that...
I used to be more able to do when I didn't live in a studio apartment. So these are kind of a collective of tips that I found to be very, very helpful that I'm currently kind of playing around with and implementing. And some just general ideas that I know have worked for clients of mine in the past. So let's go ahead. Let's dive into this. And actually, some of what we're going to be talking about today is very, very related to what we're doing in my Burnout Proof Members Club right now. My Members Club, this quarter, we've been talking all about routines.
absolutely amazing workbook that helps with this. Some of the tips today are going to be very, very related to that. I'll touch on those a little bit more when we get to them. But if you feel like you need help with some of these kind of routine related tips, head on over to coachellen.com again, e-l-l-y-n dot com slash membership. You can check that out. Join us. This is the last month where we're going to be talking about that. That is a great time to get in on this. With that, let's go ahead and let's dive into the tips. The first tip is to create a
Ellyn Schinke (02:16.166)
a dedicated workspace. This is a very, very helpful tip, especially for those of us that work from home, because I feel like the biggest time when it's really hard to disconnect from work is when you work from home. I'm not saying that those of us that don't work from home don't struggle to shut down at the end of the day, but having a dedicated workspace can often help with this.
So really, and I think this is a very, very psychological thing, the reason why this helps. The more you can have a space that you go to for work, but that you step away from when you're not working, the better. I definitely will say that the times when I've gotten into, because I live in a studio apartment, if you follow me on Instagram, you know that my life literally exists in a 497 square foot box where this little nook of it is my home office, is my desk and my whole little home office setup.
hard for me to disconnect because I can see my desk. I can see my home office basically at all times when I'm in my apartment. I am though very, very proud of the fact that I think having some visual separation is a good way to do this. If you are like me and have in your office is kind of smack in the middle of the room that you live in. Maybe it's off your kitchen, maybe it's off your living room. If that's the case, something that I actually have found to be tremendously helpful
this distinction, this dedicated workspace, is to have a visual separation. So if you're watching the video for this, you'll be able to see this, but for those of you that aren't, I'm going to kind of try to describe the setup as much as I can. But to the right of my office, to the right of my little home workspace, I have a Ikea Calix unit.
And this was a really, really important thing for me in this space. I didn't realize it when I set up my studio, how important it would be, but I have an IKEA Calix unit. And why that is so important is because when I am sitting on my couch at the end of the day, maybe watching Netflix or when I'm winding down for bed at the end of the day, this IKEA Calix unit is a visual divider between my desk, my computer, and those other parts of my apartment.
Ellyn Schinke (04:31.766)
When I'm at some points in my couch, my little living, it's not even a living room, my little living area in my studio, I can still see my computer. But when I'm in bed, when I'm in the kind of bedroom part of my studio, I can't see my computer. So sometimes if you don't have a completely distinct space, sometimes the biggest thing that we might need is just some visual separation. So at the end of your workday, can you put up a screen or something like that to separate your workspace?
away from your living space so that it's not in your face all day. I hope that makes sense. But creating a dedicated workspace and as much as you can, keep that space for work. I definitely will acknowledge, and again, like I said in recent episodes, this podcast is about helping us become burnout proof. It's by no way me saying that I already am because there's a lot of shit that I do wrong still. One of the biggest things that I do wrong that I know I need to get better at is not...
doing like for fun things at my desk. Like for example, I've gotten into a bad habit of watching YouTube videos from my computer while I'm making dinner. And I could very easily, like honestly, it would be so easy for me to do that on my TV. Shut down my computer, just shut it down at the end of the day, do that on my TV. But I've gotten into a bad habit of letting myself just kind of entertain.
on my computer instead of really making this a dedicated workspace. So I feel like in that, I gave you a what to do, create some visual separation between where you work and where you live if you work from home. And for a what not to do, try to just work on your computer and try not to entertain.
on your, at your workspace, try to have a separate place where you can do that. Like I could very easily, and I'm literally staring at it right now while I record this, I could very easily take my iPad and put my iPad over by my computer. So if I did need to look something up or I wanted to do something kind of like personally that involves me needing to be on a computer or on technology, I could use my iPad for those things instead of use a computer. So definitely something that I feel like I need to do.
Ellyn Schinke (06:46.134)
that I'm still working on. But that's tip number one, create a dedicated workspace. Bonus tip, create visual separation between that workspace and where you live, especially if you work from home. That is going to help with the disconnection at the end of the day. And actually, this next tip kind of transitions quite nicely into this. The second thing that we can do to better help us disconnect from work is to have a regular schedule. Now, caveat. I'm going to immediately start this one off with a caveat.
I used to talk all the time and I don't think I've talked about this enough. If this is something you're interested in hearing more about, I will totally do a whole podcast episode on this. In fact, I should. I literally should just add it to my podcast, my content ideas after this. There are different productivity styles. This is the caveat of this one. There are definitely different productivity styles. There are people who are, they very much like the structure of this is when I work and I work Monday through Friday these hours or whatever it might be.
But then there's people who like the flexibility to just work whenever the hell they want to work, work when they're feeling motivated, work when they are feeling focused and they have the capacity for it. So there's these two different styles of working and the style of working where you're kind of a little bit more free flowing, you're kind of a little bit more, it doesn't, it's not a set schedule. It's not gonna be the same thing week to week, day to day.
This is going to be a harder one for those people to implement. Maybe even just one of the takeaways from this episode is that every single tip I'm going to give today doesn't necessarily mean it's applicable to every single person. Pick and choose. Take the tips that resonate with you. Take the tips that you feel like are applicable to you, your lifestyle, and how you work. This might be a tip that isn't applicable to every person's lifestyle and every person's how they work. I will say right now that I kind of enjoy, this is part of the freedom of...
entrepreneurship and why I went into being a business owner and why I chose this path is I wanted the freedom and the flexibility to not be locked into being at my desk every day at 9 a.m., to not be, you know, oh, this is when I do content creation. I like the freedom to be able to kind of go with the flow and see what I'm feeling like that day, but I totally also understand the appeal and perhaps sometimes the necessity of having a regular schedule. But I digress.
Ellyn Schinke (08:56.082)
Maintaining a regular schedule can really, really help with being able to disconnect from work. This could be a regular schedule in a lot of capacities. Having a regular sleep schedule, that's actually important just in general so that you can train your body. This is actually probably the one part of this that I'm like, yeah, everybody should probably do this. It trains your body to have our energy increase at a certain time and decrease at a certain time. If you start to feel your energy lagging in the late afternoon, you're going to be able
Perhaps that's your body's way of signaling, hey, this is the end of your workday. Training your body with a regular sleep schedule can be really, really important for us to be able to disconnect from work when we need to disconnect from work. I think simultaneously, it can sometimes be really, really helpful for us to have a regular schedule in our actual work lives. When we're running our own business, sometimes it's very, very tempting to work.
late at night, but not even that. Sometimes when you're just in corporate, it's really, really tempting to work late at night. Again, especially if you're somebody that works from home, and I know there's still a lot of us that do. The boundaries are so blurred when you work from home, but I actually even feel like, and I'm going to, I feel like we need to say this more when we're talking about work from home. I actually feel like perhaps everybody works from home to some capacity. There are those of us that just like straight up work from home, but they're absolutely
people who are in corporate who go to the office every day, and then they get home at night and the work doesn't end and they're still answering emails and they're still doing to do's. It can be tempting for them too, because we can work from our laptops, we can work from our phones. So trying to as best you can have a regular schedule. And the reason why I think this is so beneficial is because it creates predictability, especially if you work with other people. Now, if you're not just like working with clients, you're actually working with peers and coworkers.
When you have a consistent schedule, it lets them know when you are available as well. I think one of the biggest reasons why we struggle to disconnect from work, especially in that context where it's your peers and your coworkers that are reaching out to you and connecting with you, part of the reason why they're maybe doing that is maybe you don't have a predictable schedule and they don't know when is the best time to contact you, when is the best time to reach out. I also think maybe it's worth for people who do have coworkers.
Ellyn Schinke (11:17.826)
to have a little bit more of a set schedule so that people aren't working all hours of the day and people don't feel the need to respond at all hours of the day. We're getting a little bit off topic because frankly, some of that, some of having a regular schedule might be an organizational thing and might be a thing about, you know, how do we just create more burnout proofness in our organizations? That's, I think, a conversation for another time, but as best you can to have a regular schedule to set the expectations of when people can hear from you and can expect to hear from you.
but also to just set expectations for yourselves, your loved ones, your family members. We're sharing our time, not just between work, but also in our lives and in our relationships. And if people expect, if your family members, your loved ones expect that you're gonna be off and ready to have dinner with them and socialize with them and be present with them at five, 5.30, six, whatever it might be, that's almost like an added layer of accountability to making sure that we're getting off
we're disconnecting and being done working. So that's another benefit of having that regular schedule. But I will fully acknowledge that is not something that works for everybody, and that's just not how everybody works. So the next one, the third tip, so we've talked about creating a dedicated workspace, maintaining a regular schedule, which again, total caveats, that one I totally know. The third tip is about setting boundaries. And actually, I think this dovetails really nicely. If you were somebody that when I talked about having a regular schedule, you're like,
yeah, but, yeah, but I can't do that. I can't do that for XYZ reasons. I think this one is going to be really important for you because when it comes to setting boundaries, this can be so many different things. Setting boundaries is a Pandora's box. I know that. I have done full blown hour and a half long workshops all about setting boundaries, all about recognizing when boundaries are needed, how to best communicate those boundaries. But people knowing when they can be in contact with you.
and communicating your availability and the ways in which we do that are boundaries in our lives. If you're somebody who, when I said maintain a regular schedule, was going, yeah, but what about this? What about that? That is probably a sign to me that you need more concrete boundaries in your life. I understand that boundaries are hard and that there's a lot of conflicting emotions and guilt and all sorts of things that go along with boundaries. I've recorded episodes on boundaries before. I'll link some of them in the show notes.
Ellyn Schinke (13:43.354)
Ultimately, it is crucial for us to separate our personal time from our work. It's crucial. We have to. You're not being irresponsible by doing that. You agreed to do a certain job, and if that job bleeds outside of the agreed upon hours, if your workload does not fit into your hours, that is not a you thing. That is a your company thing. That is not a you being ineffective thing.
because you're a high achiever, you're probably very effective with your time. It's not a you thing, it's a company thing. It's an unsustainability in the organization and the company. If you're an entrepreneur and a business owner, same thing. It is unsustainability in the work that you put on your plate. It's not a, I suck and I'm not being effective thing. For the vast majority of people who are high achieving and high performing, it's not a you thing. But what we can do and something that I would highly recommend for people who want to maintain a regular schedule and know they need boundaries.
is to leverage technology to help you set those boundaries. There are some very, very easy ways we can leverage technology to set our boundaries. For example, schedulers. I personally don't think anybody should ever have full-blown access to our calendar where they can just schedule whenever the hell they want to. I don't think that any organization should have that. I think every organization should have schedulers where we can define, these are my work hours.
This is how much time I need between meetings, where we can block out a lunch break, perhaps. Schedulers are an easy technological way that we can have boundaries and protected time without us needing to constantly communicate that time is protected. You know what I mean? I think that's one of the reasons why sometimes the boundaries don't get set is we only have so much.
willpower and decision making ability. And if every single time somebody's scheduling something into our calendars and into our lives, we have to put up walls against, nope, I won't take a meeting past this time or, nope, that's my lunch break or, oh, I don't want to schedule it here because then I'll have back to back meetings and that's really exhausting for me. If every time we're scheduling, we have to communicate that to people, that is going to drain our willpower, that is going to drain our ability to kind of make decisions.
Ellyn Schinke (16:00.206)
to uphold those boundaries. So the more we can leverage technology to do that and just be like, oh, here's my scheduler. And your scheduler already has that time built in and that time protected, the better. So that's honestly something I swear by in my business. The only times I ever have back to back meetings is when I do that. And sometimes I have to because I'm still transitioning out of my day job and kind of taking my business more and more full time. But schedulers are a game changer because they inherently...
protect your time and protect the boundaries you want to have around your time. So it could be that. It also could be things like having out of office responders, having, you know, something that I always say is a great passive boundary to have is put your work hours in your email signature. Like, I literally have it, and this is actually a tremendous conversation starter I've personally found in my business, is I have below my email signature for my business, for my coaching business, I have...
I do not respond to emails after, I think it's a 6.30 PM Pacific time, which is actually so kind of late, but I don't respond to emails after 6.30 PM Pacific time on weekdays and on weekends because couldn't we all, I think I say because no one likes a burned out burnout coach and couldn't we all use a little bit more disconnection in our lives. Those are just two very, very simple ways that you can use technology and leverage technology to set and uphold and establish those boundaries for you.
without you having to constantly do it. Because I think that's one of the places where our willpower kind of falters is when it's on us to constantly uphold that boundary. That can be really, really hard. So set clear boundaries, establish what your work hours are, what is the space you need between meetings, so on and so forth. Set those clear boundaries and it's gonna make it easier for you to not be working late. It also might even include boundaries around just like making space in your day for you to actually get work done and to not be in meetings, but I digress.
The fourth tip is to have a mindful transition. And frankly, I think this is one of the best things that we can do to help us shut off at the end of the day. Honestly, if you take any tip from here, I would recommend it be this one. And this is again, something that if you need support with this, we can give you inside of the Burnout Proof Members Club. But one of the best things we can do is to create some sort of a shutdown routine for ourselves from our work day. It could be a mindfulness ritual. It could be any of a variety of things, but...
Ellyn Schinke (18:23.014)
Ultimately, we need transitions between our day. I think people overestimate their ability to mentally switch gears from working to personal time, or even from their morning routine with their kids into their work day. I think we overestimate our ability to mentally switch gears. We're generally speaking, not very good at that. So what having this kind of mindful transition or the shutdown routine at the end of the day, whichever one you wanna call it, is it helps you transition from work to personal life. And it could be so many different things.
It could be a brief meditation. It could be a walk. It could be any activity that helps you clear your mind and shift your focus away from work. I personally would recommend doing some sort of physical activity. So maybe it's going for a walk. Maybe it's going to the gym at the end of the day. Whatever it might be, honestly, you could get home, park your car in the driveway, and just go for a little quick walk around the block. And that would probably be enough because what that does, why I think this is so powerful,
is sometimes we need a little bit of mental space to decompress, to kind of go through and tie up any of the loose ends mentally that we need to take care of. Maybe we've got a few ideas shuffling around or a few quick emails we need to get out. We can then do that while we're doing that quick little walk or that quick little workout. But what it also does is we sometimes need physical movement. We often need physical movement, in fact, to resolve our stress cycle.
to resolve your stress cycle, that to go from that fight, flight, or freeze into rest and digest, into the parasympathetic nervous system, we have to move. There has to be some sort of physical component to that resolution. So I will say often in my speaking, in the speaking workshops I do, that a pro tip for resolving your stress cycle is to build it into the end of your workday. So I will go work out often at the end of my workday, or I'll go for a walk, especially if it's like summer and it's actually still.
light out because it's light out until like 930 in Seattle in the summer. Got to love summers in Seattle. They're great. But don't move here because there's too many of us already. But have some sort of mindful transition, whatever it might be. It honestly could sometimes be as simple as shutting down your computer or just doing a brain dump at the end of the day. I would highly recommend again doing something physical, but some sort of shutdown routine to get you out of work mode and into personal mode. The fifth tip is actually very related to this, but it's something very specific that we can do.
Ellyn Schinke (20:38.51)
Tip number five is to take some decompression time. When I say decompression time, what I'm actually referring to is sensory rest. Sensory rest is one of, I think, seven or nine forms of rest. I don't remember off the top of my head how many there are, but sensory rest is always the one that really resonated with me, because sensory rest is something that the vast majority of us do not get enough of. Like, we are staring at artificially backlit screens.
listening to music or notifications and pings on our phone. We are constantly overstimulated from a sensory perspective, most of us. What this decompression time can be is literally taking a moment to... I actually think the best way to do this is taking a moment where you are in quiet and you are in darkness to just decompress, to just get that... It's like a sensory pause button at the end of your day.
I actually think this is something that just talking about this is making me realize this is something I want to do. I already kind of do a little shutdown routine at the end of my day when I'm transitioning out of my work day, but I want to start coupling that with my shutdown routine and taking some decompression time, just sitting in quiet in the dark for just five minutes, almost like a mini meditation at the end of the day to give myself that sensory rest, to get my
you know, racing and constantly thinking of new ideas and thoughts. I am, I've said it before, very, very pro meditation, not because it's about turning off your brain and not thinking, but it's about teaching yourself that you don't have to react to every single thought you have. And that's to me what this decompression time is. It's giving you that sensory rest. It's giving you that white space. It's giving you that pause button to wrap up all the mental loops of your day so that you can transition out of the day. So with that, those are my five tips.
to disconnect from work, to disconnect from your business, to disconnect from your day job, whatever it might be. I'll just recap them really quick for you. The first one was creating a dedicated workspace. The second was about maintaining a regular schedule. And again, the caveat is that not all of us are gonna have a regular schedule. Not all of us are gonna want one, that's fine. Three is setting boundaries and leveraging technology to really support those boundaries so you don't constantly have to be the person that's supporting them.
Ellyn Schinke (22:57.258)
Number four was having some sort of a mindful transition or like a shutdown routine at the end of your day. Highly recommend incorporating something physical into that. And then last, but not least, taking some decompression time, getting yourself some sensory rest at the end of your day to help your brain switch gears. So I hope you learned so much from this episode. I hope you really got some tips that you feel like are gonna resonate with you. And before you go, I just, again, wanna say thank you. I feel like...
I'm so grateful for it. There's been a lot of growth in this podcast recently. And so I'm just grateful for you spending time with me today for listening. Again, my whole goal and the reason I started this podcast is I always want to put the learnings and the ahas and the things that are really resonating with me into the hands of Engegram three achievers like me, like us who really, really need those things. Because I know I'm not the only person who's sick of cookie cutter. I'm sick of the cookie cutter BS, quit more or quit, quit your job, sleep more.
I know we're all sick of that. And that's why I would love to hear your feedback and what you took from today's episode. So go ahead, head on over to Instagram. I'm at Coach Ellen, E-L-L-Y-N. And share this episode, share a screenshot, tag me and let me know what you thought. And if you haven't already, I would really, really appreciate if you could share this podcast with a friend who might need it. If you could rate and review, it makes such a difference. But again, I just wanna thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you so much, my friend. I'm so grateful for you.
and I will talk to you next time.
