Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Nora’s mind that’s still at work
Nora is a UX designer who runs a YouTube channel on the side, teaching design to non-designers.
Most evenings, she sits down at eight to record a video, and the day job is still in her head.
So she calls it a discipline problem and pushes harder, and the videos keep coming out flat.
🧩 Her struggle:
She goes straight from work to recording with nothing in between,
so her mind is still on work when she hits record.
One morning, waiting for a meeting to start,
she reads an article a coworker shared, which tells the true story of a woman
who also never gave her workday a clear ending,
and later sold her first company for $315 million.
Her fix is about where she leaves her phone.
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🩸 The day she woke up in her own blood
Arianna Huffington passed out at her desk, hit her cheekbone on the corner of it,and woke up in a pool of her own blood.
It was April 2007, and she was building The Huffington Post on eighteen-hour days.
She broke the bone.
She hadn’t been ill.
She’d been awake too long, for too many months in a row.
Ouch.
She went to doctors expecting a diagnosis, and there was nothing wrong with her.
The only thing wrong was the way she’d been living.
Turns out she has since called that collapse the best thing that ever happened to her.
In 2011, AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million.
Later she left, and started a company built entirely around what she’d just learned.
Thrive Global teaches companies like Accenture and JPMorganthe same habits that kept her from collapsing again.
It starts with the way she ends her own day.
Around ten at night she carries her phone out of the bedroom and charges it outside.
The phone, she says, is where every problem and every project and every source of stress lives.
Getting it out of the room is what separates the day from the night.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Disconnect Ritual
Arianna carries her phone out of the bedroom at ten,
and getting it out of the room is what separates her day from her night.
This move is called The Disconnect Ritual.
She didn’t force herself to stop thinking about work.
She built an ending ritual, and the ritual does the switching for her.
The workday gets an ending instead of trailing into the evening.
So before you start working on your side hustle, do an ending ritual for your day job.
This way your mind is completely off your day job.
Now, you can sit down to your own work, with your mind actually off the day job.
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🛠️ Nora’s turn
Remember Nora, and the videos she records at eight with her mind still on the day job?
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what she already does every evening without fail.
Her AI sidekick puts it plainly:
Close your laptop, leave your work phone in the kitchen, and make your tea, in that order, before you record.
At a quarter to eight, she closes her laptop, leaves her work phone in the kitchen, and makes her tea.
The first take is the one she keeps.
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🌅 Five weeks later
Nora has done the same three steps every weeknight since.
Most of her videos now need only one take.
A viewer commented that she sounds calmer than she used to.
Your side project deserves your whole mind, not what’s left over from the day job.
Take your work phone out of the room, and let that be the end of your workday.
That’s it, my fellow mavericks!
Yours ‘bringing you cheat codes for 25x faster business success’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below designs your end-of-day ritual out of things already in your evening, so
there is nothing new to remember.
🧰 What you’ll need
When your workday actually ends, what you do next, and what keeps running in your head
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. last Slack message about 6:40, then I make dinner with my laptop open, still thinking about the 4pm meetingWhere you work, whether you leave that place, and what you want the evening to be for
- e.g. spare bedroom, three steps from the bed, and I want ninety minutes on the YouTube channelWhat you already do every evening without fail
- e.g. feed the cat, make tea, take my glasses off
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my video list, my analytics, or my drafts, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my viewers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people who want to learn design but never trained as designers.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- The ritual must take under five minutes and use only things already in my evening. Do not add a habit, an app, or a purchase.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
When my work day actually ends, what I do next, and what keeps running in my head:
{e.g. last Slack message about 6:40, then I make dinner with my laptop open, still thinking about the 4pm meeting}
Where I work, whether I leave that place, and what I want the evening to be for:
{e.g. spare bedroom, three steps from the bed, and I want ninety minutes on the YouTube channel}
What I already do every evening without fail:
{e.g. feed the cat, make tea, take my glasses off}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. Where the line should go — the exact moment my work day should be declared over, given what I described.
2. The ritual — three or four physical actions in a fixed order, built from things already in my evening, under five minutes total.
3. The unfinished-business step — what I do with the thing still running in my head, so it stops running.
4. The bad-day version — the same ritual cut down to one action, for the nights I would otherwise skip it.
5. The tell — what I will notice in two weeks if this is working, described concretely.
Then tell me the single action to do tonight that means the day is closed.