The hardest part of my day isn’t the work itself. It’s stopping.

I know I’m not alone in this. Since the shift to hybrid and remote work accelerated across Australia, the line between “work time” and “not-work time” has become so blurred that many of us don’t really have one anymore.

A 2025 survey from the Centre for Future Work found that nearly 40 percent of Australian workers regularly check work emails outside of business hours. Not because they’re asked to. Because they can’t seem to stop.

If that sounds familiar, here are some strategies that actually work. I’ve tested all of them. Some stuck. Some didn’t. But the ones that did made a real difference.

Create a Shutdown Ritual

This is the single most effective thing I’ve done. At the end of my work day — and I mean a specific time, not “when I feel done” — I do the same three things:

1. I write down where I’m up to on whatever I was working on
2. I write tomorrow’s top three priorities
3. I close my laptop and put it in a drawer

The whole thing takes less than five minutes. But it gives my brain a signal: we’re done. The act of writing things down means I’m not carrying open loops into the evening. I know where I’ll pick up tomorrow, so I can let go of today.

Cal Newport calls this a “shutdown complete” ritual, and the psychology behind it is sound. Open tasks create what’s known as the Zeigarnik effect — your brain keeps running background processes on unfinished work. Writing things down externalises those loops and gives your brain permission to stop.

Set a Hard Boundary With Notifications

I turned off all work notifications on my phone after 5:30pm. Email, Slack, Teams — all of it. If something is genuinely urgent, someone can call me.

In two years of doing this, no one has ever called.

That tells you something about how much of our after-hours checking is driven by habit rather than necessity. The messages will be there in the morning. They almost never require an immediate response.

If you’re worried about missing something critical, talk to your manager about it. Agree on what constitutes a genuine emergency and how it should be communicated. Then silence everything else.

Change Your Environment

If you work from home, this is especially important. Your brain associates spaces with activities. If you work at the kitchen table and then try to have dinner at the same table, your brain hasn’t switched contexts.

Where possible, create a physical boundary. Close the office door. Pack up your work materials. Change out of your work clothes. Go for a walk around the block, even a short one, to create a transitional buffer between work mode and home mode.

I know not everyone has a dedicated office. When I was working from a corner of my bedroom, my shutdown ritual included physically covering my laptop with a cloth. It sounds silly, but it worked.

Move Your Body

This isn’t about exercise as punishment or calorie burning. It’s about using physical movement to shift your nervous system from the sympathetic state (alert, task-focused, slightly stressed) to the parasympathetic state (calm, relaxed, present).

A 20-minute walk after work is one of the most reliable decompression strategies available. No podcast required. No step target. Just walking and letting your mind wander.

If walking isn’t your thing, stretching, swimming, dancing in your kitchen, or playing with your dog all achieve the same thing. The point is to get out of your head and back into your body.

Be Honest About Why You Can’t Stop

Sometimes the inability to switch off isn’t really about work. It’s about avoiding whatever’s on the other side of it.

If you stop working, you might have to sit with difficult feelings. You might have to deal with a relationship issue, or face boredom, or confront the fact that work has become your entire identity.

I’ve been there. When I first went freelance, I worked every evening because I didn’t know what to do with myself when I wasn’t working. It took me a while to realise that was a problem worth looking at.

If you suspect your inability to switch off is about more than just bad habits, it might be worth talking to someone about it. A psychologist or counsellor can help you figure out what’s driving the pattern.

The Bigger Picture

We live in a culture that often rewards being always available. But the research is clear: chronic overwork leads to worse performance, worse health, and worse relationships. The people who sustain high-quality work over the long term are the ones who rest properly. Some Australian companies are even working with firms like AI consultants Adelaide to build smarter notification systems that respect after-hours boundaries — which tells you that the business case for switching off is getting harder to ignore.

Switching off after work isn’t selfish. It’s maintenance. You wouldn’t drive a car without ever changing the oil and expect it to keep running. Your brain is no different.

Pick one strategy from this list. Try it for a week. See what happens.

The work will still be there tomorrow. You deserve an evening that’s actually yours.