How To Shut Off Work & Focus On What's Most Important

Oh my goodness. This is the post I desperately needed today. I don’t know about you, but work can start to become an all-encompassing thing around our household.

As someone who has a career outside the home and still trying to build a business, it can be hard to shut the laptop off and focus on what’s most important – which is my family.

The last few weeks, as I felt my busy season coming to an end I’ve found myself more and more ready to shut off work. I was feeling the urge to be more present with our son and to really focus on the needs of my family.

Have you ever noticed that pull and desire? It can be hard to tell yourself to stop working on something that has a deadline (either real or self-given) and turn your brain off from even thinking about it. Even if I was playing with our son, I usually had my phone next to me to right down ideas or things to do.

That’s not the kind of mother I want to be.

So here I am, busy season over and I’m learning to shut off work and focus on what’s most important to me – my husband, my son and myself.

Here’s what I’ve found to really help and when you’re ready, give these a try:

Give Yourself Permission

This can be the hardest step, but that’s why it’s first. Give yourself the okay to shut everything down. It’s okay to make your project wait until tomorrow. To not finish those calls late at night so you can actually eat dinner with your family. It’s okay to come home from work and not open your laptop even once. It’s okay.

Give yourself the permission to really be in the moment and do what you love, whatever that is.

Decide What Excites You Most

An easy way to help you focus on what’s most important is deciding what excites you. What are passionate about? What motivates you to work so hard? Use those tools to find something to focus on other than work. It might be your family – if that’s the case then find something fun to do together. It might be painting – well then block out time so that you can paint at the end of the day, each morning or on the weekends. Find something that makes you excited and chase it.

Prioritize Your List Before Stopping

This one is a stress reducer. If you spend the last 5-10 minutes each work day to decide on your top three for the next day then you will be able to walk away much easier. Decide what tasks really need to get done tomorrow so that when you leave you don’t feel as if you have an uncompleted cycle. It could be a simple list of your tip three – the top three things that have to get done. Maybe you just need to make an segmented list that includes client work, administrative tasks, and other. That way you have a few in each category to help you feel more at ease.

I tend to keep a running to do list all day on my desk. It has everything that needs to get done – client work, administrative tasks, other, etc. Then at the end of the day, I copy that list over to a new sheet of paper. I remove everything that was accomplished that day and then write my new list in order of priority. That way when I come back in the next day I know exactly where to start to get the most important thing done.

You can also keep a running list of non-important items. When you add something to your to-do list, but find that you never have the time to actually get it done, then maybe it’s time to move it. So create a list on your computer that is a running to-do list of non-important and non-urgent tasks. When you find yourself out of more important tasks or with just a few minutes in between meetings then you can open this list to knock off something small.

What are you doing to help you shut off work and focus on what’s most important?