Mandy Brown on ending your day:
Here’s a small trick that worked for me over the dozen years I led remote teams: at the end of your working day, shut down every app on your machine. Yes, all of them. Stash your tabs somewhere if you must, but close them all down. The only exception that may be made is for a simple note-taking app—the kind that lacks any kind of notifications. Then, spend ten or perhaps fifteen minutes reflecting on your day, whether in said note-taking app or, even better, on paper. This needn’t be anything formal or structured, just jot a few things down—maybe short phrases, maybe just some key words. The only hard rule is to do your best to keep any sense of judgement out. Then, in the morning, when you open up your machine, there should be nothing yelling at you—no unread badges, no cluster of notifications calling for your attention.
This is the best shutdown routine you can do.
I have a literal shutdown routine at the end of my day — I shutdown my computer after quitting all apps, then turn it on again in the morning. The only app I have set to open on startup is my journalling app, Diarly, everything else is menu bar and background utilities.