Our next question comes from currently over excited. Who asks, how do you tame post shutdown over excitement? All right, so he or she elaborates, suppose you are working on a problem you really like, you have a plan to solve it. But it is complicated. So it'll take weeks, possibly months, you are optimistic, you may be able to solve it as a big deal, because it's important stuff.

Does it happen to you that you're not able, really able to shut down even to the point where sleeping becomes difficult? He or she adds, I'm fully aware that this is a great problem to have. Yes, this is a problem. I suffer from this problem. When you're working on exciting things, and in particular things that are intellectually demanding, and you're starting to make progress.

So you're getting that neurochemical high that comes from some of the pieces starting to click together, right, which is a very appealing sensation. It's also something that really can drag your attention towards what you're trying to solve and very hard to rinse your attention away from. It can be hard to say, okay, now I'm going to go do something else.

Now I'm going to go just enjoy a quiet evening, reading the newspaper. Now I'm going to try to sleep, it is a problem. Now for me, it was actually this problem, which I began to experience pretty strongly during graduate school, that led to the innovation of some of the ideas that I still push today.

I mean, I've talked about this before, but it's been a while, that as I was approaching, my memory is my dissertation. I was starting to have these overexcitement issues because at the time there were some proofs that weren't working. So it was sort of negative overexcitement. I wasn't like, yeah, making progress, I love it.

It's wait a second, I don't think this proof, this proof might not be working. My whole dissertation needs this to work. And it was very hard to let that go. So I remember that very clearly. The other thing that was happening during grad school, I remember this very clearly, is I was having a lot of ideas about the deep life, how I wanted to live my life.

There was a lot of really fundamental thinking happening, what's important to me, what's not. And I didn't know what to do with those thoughts. That was also a source of overexcitement. It was just always there, always bouncing around. I was worried I would forget them. I was worried there's so much possibility that I was missing options.

Both were causing overexcitement. It was in that context that I innovated my shutdown routine. That is where schedule shutdown complete came from. Users of my time block planners, readers of deep work, readers of my newsletter all know about my shutdown routine, which is pretty rigorous. You really close all the open loops, you make a plan for the next day, you get everything out of your head.

And then you say a phrase to indicate, I am done thinking about work for the day. That was innovated in that grad school context for me. So if I was very worried about a proof or something like this, I, during my shutdown routine could capture all my thoughts. Okay, here's where I'm stuck.

Here's what I'm gonna work on tomorrow. I have three angles I'm going to try. I'm going to start at first thing. There's my plan. Shutdown complete. My mind could trust there is a plan. You don't have to think about this now. Progress will happen the next day. This was also when I innovated the Moleskine idea notebook, that capture mechanism of always having this Moleskine with me that I began to use for formally capturing thoughts about my life and having a set time once a month is what I did back then, which I would review this notebook.

So I could capture thoughts in there that arose and release them. That if I was watching a documentary and got really excited about, you know, I just have this insight from this documentary that this is what I need in my life, more of x more of y, I could write them in that notebook, and know that that notebook was going to be reviewed like clockwork at the end of each month, I wasn't going to forget that idea, I did not have to expend a lot of energy keeping that in my head or worrying about forgetting it.

Those two innovations, shutdown routine for my work, a capture system for big ideas about my life, those two systems actually did greatly reduce issues with over excitement around ideas. Right, all that still being said, yes, I still suffer from it. When you're working on cool things, it is hard to shut down.

It's hard to let things go. I mean, I face this a lot. I think working for the New Yorker, this has become more acute, because there's typically a faster pace of things and more going on and things will pop up in the evening. You're hear back from a source for an article or there's feedback on coming back from it, or there's a lot of things that happen.

Things are coming together, and it's hard to shut down. I had this issue last night, we're closing an article, there's just a lot of things happening that night, we're trying to get it together real quick, and it's hard to let that go. I get this way with book writing too.

When I'm working on proposals, like the proposals I'm working on right now, the ideas fester. I was like, "This isn't quite right," because I'm trying to get the ideas just right. I spend months and months working on just a high level framework and ideas that eventually will become the book.

That can really stick in my mind, and I can't let it go. This happened to me most recently, I think it was on one of the High Holy Days, maybe on Yom Kippur. There's an angle on the deep life book I was working on, and I couldn't let it go because it wasn't working.

I was coming back to it again and again, and all day long it was just obsessively festering and I couldn't let it go. It still happens to me with book ideas too. If it's not quite right or starting to come together but it doesn't quite work, I have a hard time letting it go.

We've got good news and bad news. Here's my summary. The good news is structure and routine help. Shutdown routines really help. Good capture systems help, where you can get the information and ideas in a place where you know they will be reviewed. You won't forget them. That helps your mind forget them.

That all helps. The bad news is if you're working on exciting stuff, you're not going to completely get rid of the problem. As you said, it's not a bad problem to have. If you can just blunt its impact a little bit, having a few nights where you have a hard time getting to sleep because there's something so cool you're working on probably is a fair price to pay for working on things that are cool.