How Do You Tame Post-Shutdown Over Excitement?

00:00:00.000 | Our next question comes from currently over excited.

00:00:10.160 | Who asks, how do you tame post shutdown over excitement?

00:00:14.960 | All right, so he or she elaborates, suppose you are working on a problem you really like,

00:00:20.960 | you have a plan to solve it.

00:00:22.880 | But it is complicated.

00:00:23.880 | So it'll take weeks, possibly months, you are optimistic, you may be able to solve it

00:00:26.480 | as a big deal, because it's important stuff.

00:00:28.240 | Does it happen to you that you're not able, really able to shut down even to the point

00:00:32.080 | where sleeping becomes difficult?

00:00:35.800 | He or she adds, I'm fully aware that this is a great problem to have.

00:00:39.800 | Yes, this is a problem.

00:00:41.320 | I suffer from this problem.

00:00:43.960 | When you're working on exciting things, and in particular things that are intellectually

00:00:47.320 | demanding, and you're starting to make progress.

00:00:51.920 | So you're getting that neurochemical high that comes from some of the pieces starting

00:00:57.720 | to click together, right, which is a very appealing sensation.

00:01:02.560 | It's also something that really can drag your attention towards what you're trying to solve

00:01:07.800 | and very hard to rinse your attention away from.

00:01:10.040 | It can be hard to say, okay, now I'm going to go do something else.

00:01:13.640 | Now I'm going to go just enjoy a quiet evening, reading the newspaper.

00:01:17.440 | Now I'm going to try to sleep, it is a problem.

00:01:19.400 | Now for me, it was actually this problem, which I began to experience pretty strongly

00:01:25.160 | during graduate school, that led to the innovation of some of the ideas that I still push today.

00:01:29.720 | I mean, I've talked about this before, but it's been a while, that as I was approaching,

00:01:34.440 | my memory is my dissertation.

00:01:37.120 | I was starting to have these overexcitement issues because at the time there were some

00:01:41.000 | proofs that weren't working.

00:01:43.080 | So it was sort of negative overexcitement.

00:01:45.000 | I wasn't like, yeah, making progress, I love it.

00:01:47.040 | It's wait a second, I don't think this proof, this proof might not be working.

00:01:50.840 | My whole dissertation needs this to work.

00:01:53.440 | And it was very hard to let that go.

00:01:55.720 | So I remember that very clearly.

00:01:57.120 | The other thing that was happening during grad school, I remember this very clearly,

00:01:59.760 | is I was having a lot of ideas about the deep life, how I wanted to live my life.

00:02:04.600 | There was a lot of really fundamental thinking happening, what's important to me, what's

00:02:08.680 | not.

00:02:09.680 | And I didn't know what to do with those thoughts.

00:02:11.620 | That was also a source of overexcitement.

00:02:12.880 | It was just always there, always bouncing around.

00:02:14.680 | I was worried I would forget them.

00:02:16.160 | I was worried there's so much possibility that I was missing options.

00:02:20.460 | Both were causing overexcitement.

00:02:22.480 | It was in that context that I innovated my shutdown routine.

00:02:26.760 | That is where schedule shutdown complete came from.

00:02:30.360 | Users of my time block planners, readers of deep work, readers of my newsletter all know

00:02:35.360 | about my shutdown routine, which is pretty rigorous.

00:02:37.760 | You really close all the open loops, you make a plan for the next day, you get everything

00:02:41.180 | out of your head.

00:02:42.180 | And then you say a phrase to indicate, I am done thinking about work for the day.

00:02:48.120 | That was innovated in that grad school context for me.

00:02:50.480 | So if I was very worried about a proof or something like this, I, during my shutdown

00:02:53.680 | routine could capture all my thoughts.

00:02:55.640 | Okay, here's where I'm stuck.

00:02:57.480 | Here's what I'm gonna work on tomorrow.

00:02:58.800 | I have three angles I'm going to try.

00:03:00.280 | I'm going to start at first thing.

00:03:02.140 | There's my plan.

00:03:03.400 | Shutdown complete.

00:03:04.400 | My mind could trust there is a plan.

00:03:06.080 | You don't have to think about this now.

00:03:07.920 | Progress will happen the next day.

00:03:09.440 | This was also when I innovated the Moleskine idea notebook, that capture mechanism of always

00:03:14.880 | having this Moleskine with me that I began to use for formally capturing thoughts about

00:03:19.480 | my life and having a set time once a month is what I did back then, which I would review

00:03:24.080 | this notebook.

00:03:25.680 | So I could capture thoughts in there that arose and release them.

00:03:31.520 | That if I was watching a documentary and got really excited about, you know, I just have

00:03:35.200 | this insight from this documentary that this is what I need in my life, more of x more

00:03:38.480 | of y, I could write them in that notebook, and know that that notebook was going to be

00:03:42.480 | reviewed like clockwork at the end of each month, I wasn't going to forget that idea,

00:03:46.320 | I did not have to expend a lot of energy keeping that in my head or worrying about forgetting

00:03:50.040 | it.

00:03:51.040 | Those two innovations, shutdown routine for my work, a capture system for big ideas about

00:03:56.200 | my life, those two systems actually did greatly reduce issues with over excitement around

00:04:03.120 | ideas.

00:04:04.120 | Right, all that still being said, yes, I still suffer from it.

00:04:07.680 | When you're working on cool things, it is hard to shut down.

00:04:12.720 | It's hard to let things go.

00:04:13.720 | I mean, I face this a lot.

00:04:15.880 | I think working for the New Yorker, this has become more acute, because there's typically

00:04:20.480 | a faster pace of things and more going on and things will pop up in the evening.

00:04:24.600 | You're hear back from a source for an article or there's feedback on coming back from it,

00:04:30.520 | or there's a lot of things that happen.

00:04:33.120 | Things are coming together, and it's hard to shut down.

00:04:36.680 | I had this issue last night, we're closing an article, there's just a lot of things happening

00:04:40.120 | that night, we're trying to get it together real quick, and it's hard to let that go.

00:04:44.720 | I get this way with book writing too.

00:04:47.480 | When I'm working on proposals, like the proposals I'm working on right now, the ideas fester.

00:04:52.560 | I was like, "This isn't quite right," because I'm trying to get the ideas just right.

00:04:57.200 | I spend months and months working on just a high level framework and ideas that eventually

00:05:01.760 | will become the book.

00:05:02.760 | That can really stick in my mind, and I can't let it go.

00:05:06.280 | This happened to me most recently, I think it was on one of the High Holy Days, maybe

00:05:12.440 | on Yom Kippur.

00:05:14.560 | There's an angle on the deep life book I was working on, and I couldn't let it go because

00:05:20.040 | it wasn't working.

00:05:22.440 | I was coming back to it again and again, and all day long it was just obsessively festering

00:05:27.960 | and I couldn't let it go.

00:05:28.960 | It still happens to me with book ideas too.

00:05:30.760 | If it's not quite right or starting to come together but it doesn't quite work, I have

00:05:34.160 | a hard time letting it go.

00:05:35.160 | We've got good news and bad news.

00:05:37.360 | Here's my summary.

00:05:38.360 | The good news is structure and routine help.

00:05:41.240 | Shutdown routines really help.

00:05:42.460 | Good capture systems help, where you can get the information and ideas in a place where

00:05:46.120 | you know they will be reviewed.

00:05:47.120 | You won't forget them.

00:05:48.120 | That helps your mind forget them.

00:05:49.440 | That all helps.

00:05:50.440 | The bad news is if you're working on exciting stuff, you're not going to completely get

00:05:54.280 | rid of the problem.

00:05:55.280 | As you said, it's not a bad problem to have.

00:05:56.760 | If you can just blunt its impact a little bit, having a few nights where you have a

00:06:01.000 | hard time getting to sleep because there's something so cool you're working on probably

00:06:04.560 | is a fair price to pay for working on things that are cool.

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How Do You Tame Post-Shutdown Over Excitement?

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