About a year ago, I talked about the importance of my startup and shutdown routines. I actually talk about this a lot. I think it's a really important thing for solopreneurs to do because you are being intentional about your day as well as capturing the context and the open threads at the end of your day, so that you're not thinking about them. And this has evolved for me a lot over the years. It used to be a text file in whatever my note taking app was at the beginning of the day where I would answer four questions and then same thing at the end of the day where again, I would answer four questions around how I was feeling that day and what I ended up getting done, what I didn't get done, and what I'm thinking about for tomorrow. Generative AI, large language models, and a few changes in my process have really upended my startup and shutdown routines. And so today, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit what those look like.

Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Streamlined Solopreneur, the show that helps you build reliable systems so that you can take time off worry-free. I'm your host, Joe Casabona.

And here's the problem. You need a good startup and shutdown routine. But what happens when things are evolving so quickly? I barely open the daily note in Obsidian myself anymore. I really don't do this massive ramble at the end of the day anymore, either. I had this maybe convoluted setup where I would have a shortcut on my phone, run four prompts, and then I would basically like word vomit into them, and then it would place them in my Obsidian Notes app.

And I wasn't using it as much as maybe I would have liked. Yes, I was capturing the context for the tasks and stuff I had to do, but I wasn't being as intentional, especially with the daily notes. I just, sometimes I didn't have it in me to do whatever it is I had to do at the end of the day. These kinds of weird constraints that we put on ourselves. Right? Like, I guess, like why, why am I going to do something when it feels more of a headache to do it, and I wasn't doing it. Right? I think that's the really important thing. Right? It is important to shut down your day in whatever way makes sense to you, but if you're just doing it for the sake of doing it, then are you really doing it the right way? So, I've been thinking a lot about my shutdown and startup routines.

Over the last couple of weeks, I wanted to share how they have changed. And over the last few weeks, I've kind of been sharing some new processes. My daily three-task journal, how I'm using Claude Cowork to do an inbox sweep, to do a scramble. And all of those things are crucial to me for what is now my startup and shutdown routine.

So first, I'll tell you about my Obsidian weekly and monthly planning, or really, my weekly and monthly planning. I have a YouTube video on the weekly planning, so I will link that in the description, but that's really going to be the linchpin of all of that. And then I'll kind of talk about the other tools I'm using to capture the context, so that, and this is important, this is the goal for me, to capture the context so that I don't feel like I have forgotten something when I leave my office. Because when that happens, I am not present with my family. I am not doing the thing that I started my business to do, which is to spend time with my family.

And I can tell you this is working because I left work early yesterday to volunteer at the ice cream social that preceded our night of the arts, where we had an art show and a spring concert. My daughter plays cello, and so I spent several hours giving out ice cream before sitting in a grammar school choir and band show. And I didn't check my phone once. I was fully present at both of these things because my startup and shutdown routine work so well.

So now that I've laid that out for you, let me kind of talk to you about what I do to plan my days monthly, weekly, and daily. And then the other tools I'm using to make sure my context is captured. So let's start with the planning.

The most important plan for me is my weekly plan. And that might sound weird because there are also monthly and daily plans, but really, the gravity of everything I'm doing happens on a week-by-week basis. I mean, honestly, a lot can change over a month, and the things that you set out to do, you know, like, I've always taken an approach of like, I'm not going to be so rigid about my monthly and even quarterly plans that I'm going to be inflexible. But the weekly plan is really important to me.

And so in my weekly plan, I review the previous week I used on lorelecomp's, I think. I think I'm always worried I'm saying her name wrong, but she wrote Tiny Experiments. She does a Plus, minus, next grid for the good things that happened, the bad things that happened, and the things that you intend on doing in the upcoming week. This is both personal and business. And so I generally do mix those things.

And then I lay out my major tasks. So this is at most 8. Well, so, I write down 18, but at most I'm picking 15 for the week for me to do so I order them. They are not in any priority order; they're just in the order in which I think of them. And this is kind of based on what's in my current inbox, what's in ToDoist, and any notes I've taken, any rollover tasks that I didn't finish the week before, and I put them into a major tasks section.

I also list the major upcoming events for the week. This is not a place where I list all of my meetings, but just the big time-consuming ones. So for the week, as I'm looking at it now, I have some travel coming up. I had the art show and my kids. It's like field trip week for the school. So that is, that's the stuff that kind of goes in upcoming events. Right? If my wife is working a weekend or if she's traveling, that is also something that I will include in there. Then I will do tasks by day. This is where the 15 comes in. I will put max three tasks per day in my tasks per day. That's going to be really important when I get to my daily plan. And then I write down major questions. So things I need to consider this week that have either been on my mind or are just something that I need to make a decision on as I'm looking at my plan this week.

We need a plan for summer. Summer is as you're hearing this, summer has started. But, as I'm recording, summer is quickly approaching. June looks disastrous for me. Just not, not in a bad way. Just a lot of travel and busy. And so those are the, those are the major questions. So that is my weekly plan.

Jumping up to my monthly plan. It's a little more, not loosey goosey, but not as specific as the weekly plan. I have three questions. What am I working on? Where do I need help? And then what is my main goal for the month? Then I have three projects or tasks I like, three kinds of overarching projects or tasks I like to do, and then all of the, again the major events that are coming up for the month.

And then I also do my yearly theme reflection for the previous month. As I record this, it is digital detox. And so I ask, what's going well? Where can I improve? What do I resolve to do in the next month to further my goals? And what is one big problem I should try to resolve related to digital detox? So that's my monthly plan. It doesn't usually take as long as my weekly plan because my weekly plan is more specific.

My daily plan is where things have changed the most. So it used to be like how are you feeling? What did you do last night? What's a personal win? What's a positive thing? What's a negative thing? And it was just like a lot of questions I didn't necessarily feel like answering. And so now my daily plan is my daily three task journal.

So at 6am I got, I get prompted what are the three tasks you need to complete today? Halfway through the day I get prompted with how are you progressing on your tasks? And at the end of the day how did, how did the work on your tasks go? Did you complete them? Why not? Or why? Like what, what helped? So that is, that's my daily, my daily note or my daily plan.

Now, my shutdown routine is folded a little bit into that. I've been using an app called Audio Pen which is really good that I will, where I'll just kind of like dictate. You know it's similar to Whisper Flow where I just kind of dictate into that text box. Um, and so that's how. That's my plan. Those are my plans.

The shutdown routine is… So I guess you can put them into like startup plans, right? The Daily 3 is like my startup plan. Like what am I going to work on today? Which has already been predetermined by my weekly plan or should have been predetermined by my weekly plan. Sometimes I call an audible.

So what does my shutdown routine look like? It's the Daily 3 task journaling app. And then are a couple of things that I do to capture context when I feel like I need to. But then I have a lot more automations in this step. So if I'm feeling like particularly open ended, I will use Whisper Memos which is a great app where it will, I talk about this all the time but basically the things that I talk into the app end up in Obsidian in my inbox and it's getting smarter and has like better Zapier integration now. So I could technically just like send that over to Todoist but Todoist has Ramble as well. And so if there's a bunch of stuff that I didn't feel like I got to, this is happening increasingly less for me because of how well my planning system is working out.

At the end of the day, if there's a bunch of stuff I didn't get to, I will just speak it into Todoist ramble and they will become tasks in my inbox for me to review at some point. But again, like this, so I used to do a scramble a ton, but because my days are planned so well now, I don't feel, and maybe this will change with the summer, but I don't feel the overwhelming urge to like leave my desk in the middle of something and then have to, then I have to like capture what I was thinking as I'm on the way to pick up the kids from school.

So my days are just planned better. But I will use Todoist ramble and then the daily three task journal to capture like kind of how I was feeling. I have two shortcuts to kind of make all of this work together. One runs in the morning and it grabs my daily three tasks and it puts them into a daily note in Obsidian. And then it does the same thing at the end of the day where it grabs the full task journal and puts it into the daily note in Obsidian.

And the reason this is important for me is because I have a little dashboard in Obsidian and it has a little, a neat little graph. Claude wrote the data view and it has like a neat little graph of how I am progressing on my daily three tasks. Something really important is that you can't just wholesale roll over anything you didn't do the next day. You need to be intentional about what you're going to do each day. And so I like seeing my progress on those tasks, and then the journal notes that accompany it so it all goes into Obsidian.

The last thing that is a really crucial part of capturing the context. I won't even say it's part of my shutdown routine now, but it's, it's something that allows me to rest easier, is two scheduled skills in Claude that or Claude cowork that I talked about in the last episode a little bit, but it's my inbox sweep skill.

And so what it will do is grab any call recordings and add my action items to Todoist, and then it'll grab any emails in my inbox as well as any emails marked as actionable and put those tasks in my inbox as well. And the reason that this has been so good for me is because as long as I'm capturing what I'm doing throughout the day, somewhere I know that the large language model, which is automation with a lot more context than previous automation skills or previous automation tools, rather, I know that it'll all make it into Todoist at some point. And so I have had that feeling of am I forgetting something? A lot less.

And again, the really important thing is I am very involved and intentional throughout this whole process. Right? Any emails that are marked as actionable, which means I have read those emails and I've told Claude to process them and then they get label as processed, labeled as processed. And so I can double-check for context. But the, you know, I've instructed this skill to kind of over-index and provide too much context. So it'll usually provide a lot of the email in that related task. So I'm really intentional about my month, my week, my day.

And then I have a number of tools and safety checks, I guess at the end of the day, to make sure that I am understanding the context. I'm not just letting some AI robot do all of this without me looking at it. Right? I feel like there's a human in the loop, but I feel like the human is the loop. The human should be the one instructing the AI. The AI should not be doing things, and then the human reviewing it for the most part. So anything that happens because of my inbox sweep or the call cleanup, all of that stuff is stuff I've already had my eyes on.

And so it's been really good. I've, I felt like I needed to talk about this because my startup and shutdown routine has changed so much, and also for the better because it no longer feels like a chore. And even on the days where I don't really feel like capturing every thought I have enough of it is getting done because of the pre-work I've done earlier in the day or earlier in the week.

So this has helped me really understand even better how I work and where I should be working. I think that's really important. And I understand how I work and where I should be working because I know what my planned process work is. And if you are wondering how you can apply some of this to your own startup and shutdown routine, I would strongly recommend that you do something I've created called the Task Audit Matrix. You can find it over at streamlined.fm/matrix, and you put in as many tasks as you want. It has to be a minimum of 10, and you decide if they are planned or reactive and focused or processed. And it'll create a grid for you. It'll do an analysis of the percentage of tasks that you can move off of your plate, and it'll email you that report. So that's over at streamlined.fm/matrix. It is, it's… I love the tool. And it's…And everything I've talked about in this episode is kind of predicated on the fact that I understand what my task matrix looks like. So check it out. It'll be in the show notes in the description.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know what you think over at streamlinedfeedback.com.

And until next time, I hope you find some space in your week.