Work used to end when you left a building. For a lot of people it now ends when they decide it does — which means it often doesn’t.

The fix is not more discipline. It’s a seam: something that marks the transition, so that switching off is carried by a habit instead of by a decision made while tired. This lesson builds it in layers.

The first layer is a closing ritual — five minutes at the end of the working day, done the same way each time. What matters most is the sameness, not the content. The effective ones have three parts:

• Land the day. A quick pass over what actually got done. Not an audit — the point is to close a loop rather than to grade yourself.
• Park tomorrow. Write down the two or three things that need to happen next, so the open items are on paper rather than circulating. This is the part that does the most work, and it’s the part people skip.
• Mark the end. A physical signal: laptop shut and put somewhere, notifications off, a short walk, changing clothes. It should be something you can’t do half-way.

The second layer is an offline window — a time after which work does not get looked at. Pick one you can actually hold: an hour is a real boundary; eight hours you’ll breach on Tuesday is not.

Why a time rather than an intention? Because I’ll check if something’s urgent puts you on duty all evening. You have to decide whether it’s urgent, and deciding requires looking. The window removes the decision — and the decision was the thing costing you.

If you work from home, the seam matters double, because it isn’t given to you any more — it has to become physical. What works is usually smaller than people expect: work only happens in one place; the laptop physically leaves that place at the end; and something separates the two. The walk that stands in for a commute is a cliché because it works.

A word about phones. A work phone that’s always in your hand is a boundary that can’t hold, and the realistic answer isn’t heroic. It’s notifications off after the window — and the work account off the device you use in the evening, if that’s possible at all.

And if your job genuinely doesn’t allow a boundary? Some don’t — on-call rotas, shift work, a team spread across time zones, one-person businesses. If that’s you, don’t fake a boundary you can’t hold. Make it specific and bounded instead: on-call Tuesday and Thursday and genuinely not the other nights, or checking at nine and not between. A smaller boundary that’s real beats a larger one you breach nightly — because the breaching is itself what keeps you on duty.