When I recently wrote about my Morning Routine that gives me a great, easy and structured start into the day, I’ve mentioned the need to also have an Evening Routine. The Evening Routine makes sure that you can start the next day with 20 minutes of planning using the Morning Routine. As you would imagine, if you leave a mess at the end of the day, it’ll take you a lot of time cleaning it up the next day. As a consequence you would start out looking backward (to the last day) and the first 60 minutes of your day may also ready yield frustration.

Also the Evening Routine is part of my concept “leave work at work” - it makes sure you have closed the day out and prepare the key elements for the next day. Hence nothing will bug you in the evening when you spend time with your family - no “I need to think of this for tomorrow” or “Gosh, I forgot to send the doc to Anja - need to do this first thing in the morning” or even “Damn, what meetings do I have tomorrow”.

Taking a look at the Evening Routine you will find similarities to the Morning Routine. However, I’ve designed it slightly different since I tend to have less time in the evening. Usually I run a bit late with some tasks, get a phone call in the last minutes or sit in a conference call that takes longer as planned. As a consequence, and primarily to get out of the office and be on time for dinner, I cut down effort in my Evening Routine.

And this is how it looks like:

• Bring Entourage Inbox to Zero: Again Entourage is my mail client of (corporate) choice, it well could be Mail.app or Outlook. And again I’d like to bring it down to Zero at the end of the day which would mean I’ve at least looked at all stuff and created tasks where required. My inbox will fill-up again over night since some of my fellow colleagues may either work late or those in other time zones will take care of populating my inbox again.
• Bring OmniFocus Inbox to Zero: All tasks that accumulated during the day and those creating during my end-of-the-day inbox clean sweep get assigned to a context and/or project - and, if applicable, get some time estimate. Hit “Clean up” in OmniFocus and boom, you’re done.
• Make sure all documents are in the DropBox: The DropBox, my simple file folder for all the stuff that I need to file away as reference or project material should contain all files that I have created/received during the day. No files on the desktop, all attachments from eMails that are important saved away into the DropBox, no clutter! The actual tagging and archiving is something I do in the Morning routine only, since this tends to steal quite some time that I rather use with my kids in the evening.
• Decide on top 3 tasks for next day: As simple as this - I scan my ‘Weekly Focus’-Perspective in OmniFocus (more on this in another post) and tasks that I have created during the day and select the 3 most important tasks to work on the next day. That again does not mean I’ am only processing 3 tasks a day (although this can easily happen and is okay) - but I will make sure I do those three
• Review next day’s calendar: Make sure I know what is cooking next day. An early conference call for which I need to adapt my morning logistics? A customer meeting that required more formal clothing (bring a tie)? A meeting that still needs some preparation (add to the top 3 tasks)? All covered.