Finding a way to truly end the workweek

Breaking: woman discovers journaling again

I’ve always struggled to feel like the workweek is actually over.

When my commute is walking out of my office downstairs into the kitchen, there’s not much time to disconnect. I don’t have a drive home, a walk to the train, or even a few minutes sitting in traffic being annoyed at people still waiting to discover the amazing invention that is the turn signal. I put my laptop to sleep, walk downstairs, and then I’m supposed to just be done thinking about work.

Sometimes that happens. A lot of the time, it doesn’t.

Instead, my brain keeps picking at the week. I’ll think about the meeting where I said something unclear and immediately decided everyone noticed. Or the thing I’m behind on, even though nobody has asked me about it, but I’ve decided it’s a bad look. Or the message I haven’t yet responded to. Or the moment where I wish I’d sounded more prepared, more direct, more thoughtful, less awkward, whatever version of myself I’ve apparently decided was required in hindsight.

Most of these things are actual emergencies. They’re not even always actual problems. They’re just the leftover bits of the week that stick around because I haven’t put them anywhere else.

I know this pattern in myself. My burnout is stress-induced, and while some of that stress comes from real work, some of it comes from the way I keep mentally re-opening things after the workday is technically over. I can close the laptop. I can stop responding to Slack. I can be physically sitting on the couch. But if I’m still replaying the same conversation from Tuesday, I haven’t really stopped working. In fact, I’ll probably re-open Slack on my phone just to double-check that the last thing I said is still there.

Recently, I started journaling again on Saturday mornings. I don’t mean an open-ended journal entry where I write whatever comes to mind and hope I discover something profound. That can be useful, but it can also give me too much room to spiral. I need structure, otherwise reflection turns into a very elaborate performance review conducted by the least generous version of myself.

My executive coach gave me three questions to answer each week:

1. What went really well this past week?

2. What did I do specifically that fed into that good outcome?

3. If this were to come up again next week, what might I do differently?

You’ll notice none of these questions ask what went badly. That’s by design. I’m very quick to study the things that went poorly, but I tend to move past good outcomes like they happened on their own. If a meeting goes badly, I’ll analyze every sentence I said. If a meeting goes well, I move on and barely register that maybe I did something to make it go well.

The first two questions have been useful because they force me to look at what actually happened. That second question is particularly fun to answer in the way good coaching questions are annoying. What did I do specifically that contributed to the outcome? Not “it went fine.” Not “the group was aligned.” What did I actually do? Did I prepare well? Did I ask a useful question? Did I slow the conversation down when it needed to be slowed down? Did I make something clearer for someone else?

The third question keeps the whole exercise from becoming either self-congratulation or self-criticism. If something similar comes up next week, what might I do differently? It gives me something practical to take forward without needing to turn every imperfect moment into a referendum on my entire personality.

But I added a fourth question, and that’s been the part that actually helps me end the week: What’s still weighing on my mind?

This is where I write down the things I’m still carrying. Usually they’re small. Sometimes they’re not. But a lot of the time, they’re things nobody else is judging me for as harshly as I’m judging myself.

• I felt unclear in that meeting.

• I’m behind on this thing and feel bad about it.

• I think I made that conversation more awkward than it needed to be.

• I’m worried I came across as unprepared.

• I should’ve followed up sooner.

Writing these down doesn’t magically fix them. That’s not really the point. Some of them may need an action next week, and if they do, I can turn them into an actual task. But most of them don’t need more thinking. They need to be acknowledged and then put down.

That distinction has been helpful for me. There’s a difference between learning from something and repeatedly making yourself feel bad about it. I’m extremely capable of disguising the second one as the first.

So when I write down what’s still weighing on me, I’m not trying to solve every item. I’m giving myself a place to say, “Yes, this bothered me.” Then, when it’s on paper, I tell myself I’m done thinking about it for the week. I’ll literally write it like this, too: “Two things that happened this week that are still on my mind, but I’m letting go of as soon as they’re down on paper.”

It feels a little like writing a letter you never send. The point isn’t that the letter changes the other person or rewrites what happened. The point is that the thing is no longer just bouncing around in your head. It exists somewhere else for a minute, and that can be enough to loosen its grip.

That’s what this Saturday morning journal has become for me. It’s not a dramatic ritual. I sit down, answer the questions, write down what I’m still carrying, and close the notebook. I’m two weeks into this habit so I have a very small sample size, but I’m learning this doesn’t take me very long to write. Five minutes, maybe 10 if I’m getting distracted. (Me? Distracted? No way.) It’s just nice giving myself the space to write and then the permission to let it go.

To be clear, I don’t think a journal can solve burnout. That’d be a ridiculous thing to claim, and also deeply annoying. Burnout is bigger than a notebook. But for me, this is less about solving burnout and more about creating a small place where the week can end.

Saturday morning has become the place where I put the week down. I name what went well. I notice what I did that helped. I decide what I might do differently. Then I write down the things I’m done carrying, even if they’re not perfectly resolved.

The work will still be there next week. There’ll be more meetings, more decisions, more awkward moments, more things I wish I’d handled slightly better. That part is unavoidable. But I’m trying to stop letting every unresolved thought follow me into the weekend just because I never gave it a place to land.