It’s been nearly 15 years since Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending film Inception came out, and I still think about it regularly.

If you’re unfamiliar, it focuses on a man named Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s known for stealing secrets from people’s subconscious by entering their dreams.

He’s hired to do the opposite — plant an idea in someone’s mind. This is called “Inception,” and since the movie came out, I’ve been using it as a verb.

If you’re in the dream world too long, you may forget and lose yourself in it. So Cobb has a token to keep him grounded in reality: a top. If it falls over, he’s in the real world. If it keeps spinning, he’s in a dream.

Keeping Myself Grounded

The past 6 weeks have been pretty crazy for me. I took 2 weeks off for Christmas and New Years, we got a puppy, we were hit with snow, I traveled, we were hit with the Flu and RSV, and I spent all of last week recording a new course.

As I write this, normalcy will evade me a little longer, as we inexplicably have a 2-hour delay this morning.

But in all that time, I was thinking about what has kept me grounded — and what was missing when the wheels felt like they were falling off.

The answer became abundantly clear when my friend Jim emailed me, asking me for my Startup and Shutdown Routine document, which is single markdown for Obsidian.

He talked about how clear and simple it is, and it dawned on me that this is my Inception token.

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve written about it, but a lot has changed since 2022!

My Startup Routine

Each day, in Obsidian I click a button to generate my “daily note,” which is based off a template I’ll link at the end of this.

At the top of the file, we have a link to Fantastical, and links to daily notes for “Yesterday” and “Tomorrow.”

Under the startup heading we have 4 prompts:

1. Last night, after work, I…
2. One thing I’m excited about right now is…
3. One+ thing I plan to accomplish today is…
4. One thing I’m struggling with today is…

Under “One+ thing” is today’s tasks, embedded from Todoist.

My Shutdown Routine

Then I have my time tracking for the day, embedded from Toggl.

Under the Shutdown heading, we have another 4 prompts:

1. What I Accomplished
2. On My Mind
3. Open Threads
4. Goals for Tomorrow

These 4 prompts allow me to dump my brain somewhere so that I’m not constantly thinking about work when I leave the office — especially if I have to do it earlier than expected.

Finally, there’s a section for general notes, which I’ll occasionally add to. Though since the start of the year, I’ve actually been journaling with notebook and pen again, and it’s been great.

There’s also a section using the Obsidian plugin Dataview, which generated a list of any note I modified that day. This is clutch because my whole idea capture system flows through Obsidian.

Here’s the file (markdown, best used in Obsidian with the aforementioned plugins), and a PDF of what the file looks like (some info redacted).

You are welcome to modify or borrow!

Do you have a startup or shutdown routine? What do you have in yours, or what would add to mine?