It is seven in the evening. The laptop is closed, but the report you did not finish keeps coming back: in the car, at dinner, at midnight. Work ended an hour ago. The day has not.
What the research shows
Unfinished tasks stay in the mind
In a series of experiments, E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished goals keep pushing into our thoughts and make us worse at unrelated tasks. When participants made a specific plan for how they would complete the goal, the intrusive thoughts and the interference disappeared, even though the goal itself was still unfinished.
Unfinished work follows us into the weekend
Christine Syrek and colleagues followed 59 employees for twelve weeks. The more tasks people left unfinished on a Friday, the more they brooded over work at the weekend, and the worse they slept. When unfinished tasks piled up over three months, weekend sleep suffered even more.
A plan helps us let go
Brandon Smit asked 103 employees about 1,127 of their work goals. People found it hardest to switch off from unfinished tasks that mattered to them. Those who wrote down where, when and how they would continue were better able to detach from work in the evening.
Switching off is not a luxury
In a review of the research on recovery, Sabine Sonnentag and Charlotte Fritz describe the same chain again and again: a heavy workload makes it harder to detach from work in free time, and less detachment goes with more exhaustion and lower well-being.
The evening shapes the next morning
Maike Arnold and Sabine Sonnentag followed 124 employees over 887 working days. After evenings of good recovery, people started work more awake and calmer; after poor evenings, they felt tired and tense, and these feelings did not improve during the day. Mentally detaching from work in the evening was closely linked to better sleep.
What closing the day well means
Closing the day does not mean finishing everything. It means knowing what is still open and where it will continue. A day is closed when every unfinished thing has a place to go.
Worth trying
- Write down what is still open. Not a full to-do list: only what you are carrying in your head as you leave.
- Give each item a when, a where and a how. “Tomorrow at nine, at my desk, I will rewrite section three.” The research suggests the plan, not the finished task, is what quietens the mind.
- Choose tomorrow’s first task. The morning then starts with a decision already made.
- Close the channels. Notifications off; if someone is waiting, one sentence to say when they will hear from you.
- Mark the end in your own way. A walk, a change of room, the same small gesture each day. Arnold and Sonnentag found that what helps people recover varies from person to person and from day to day.
For those who lead a team
Much of what stays open at six in the evening is not a personal habit but the way work is organised: messages sent at night, the unspoken expectation of a quick reply, a Friday that ends with everything still open. In a study of 142 employees and their partners, the mere expectation of keeping an eye on email after hours increased anxiety for both. Leaders can say clearly that evening replies are not expected, send late messages at a later time, and use the last hour of the week to hand over and plan, not to start something new.
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Sources
- Masicampo, E. J., Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667–683. doi.org
- Syrek, C. J., Weigelt, O., Peifer, C., Antoni, C. H. (2017). Zeigarnik’s sleepless nights: How unfinished tasks at the end of the week impair employee sleep on the weekend through rumination. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(2), 225–238. doi.org
- Smit, B. W. (2015). Successfully leaving work at work: The self-regulatory underpinnings of psychological detachment. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. doi.org
- Sonnentag, S., Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S72–S103. stacks.cdc.gov
- Arnold, M., Sonnentag, S. (2023). Study on evening recovery and next-day mood, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology (University of Mannheim press release). www.uni-mannheim.de
- Belkin, L., Becker, W., Conroy, S. A., Tuskey, S. (2018). Killing me softly: electronic communications monitoring and employee and spouse well-being. Academy of Management Proceedings. doi.org