How to Write Tomorrow’s One Thing Before You Close the Laptop

It is ten to six. You have just saved the document, the last email has gone, and your hand is already on the lid of the laptop. For the next few minutes you still know exactly where everything stands, and in about fourteen hours someone will sit down at this desk knowing almost none of it.

That someone is you tomorrow morning. The most useful way to treat these last few minutes is as a handover, of the kind one shift gives the next, to a colleague who will arrive with none of your current context and be expected to carry on regardless.

What you know at six that you will have forgotten by nine

At the end of the day you hold a set of specifics that tomorrow’s version of you will not have. They are detailed, current, and written down nowhere.

You know the particular reason the section did not work, which of the three approaches you had already ruled out, what the client actually meant in that ambiguous message, and how much of the difficult part is left. None of it feels worth recording, because right now it all seems obvious.

By the morning, what remains is a general impression that the work is in progress and somewhat behind. The specifics have gone, so the first twenty minutes of the day are spent rebuilding what you knew perfectly well the evening before. That is unpaid work, and you repeat it every day the handover is skipped.

This is the practical case for writing the line before you close the laptop rather than first thing in the morning. Discipline has very little to do with it. The information you need exists at ten to six and has largely gone by nine.

The two things a good handover note contains

A good handover note contains the status of each open item and the action the morning should start with. Shift handovers in any trade carry those same two parts, and here both matter.

Status: where each open thing stands. One line for each of three or four items, such as pricing section drafted to the second table; the numbers from finance are still missing. It records a position, so it can be brief and needs no plan attached.

Next action: what the morning starts with. A single line containing a physical action, specific enough to begin without deciding anything: draft the comparison paragraph, before opening anything else.

The second part carries the most weight and is the one most often written badly. Continue with the report names a topic, and tomorrow’s version of you cannot act on a topic. They can only think about it, and thinking about something at nine in the morning tends to lose to whatever has already arrived with a sender’s name attached.

Peter Gollwitzer’s research on implementation intentions found that deciding when, where and how you will act leads to better follow-through than a general intention. The handover is the right moment to make those decisions, since it is the last point in the day when you have the information to make them well, and the first point when nothing else is competing for your attention.

How writing the handover frees up your evening

Writing the handover also settles the open items in your head, so they are less likely to follow you home.

Masicampo and Baumeister found that unfinished goals intruded on unrelated activities, and that making a specific plan for them removed the interference before any of the work was done. The open items that lack a next step are the ones that turn up during dinner and again at eleven. Once each has a line saying where it stands and what happens next, they tend to stay at the desk.

The same four lines therefore do two jobs. They brief tomorrow’s version of you, and they let this evening’s version stop thinking about work. For a couple of minutes at six o’clock, that is a remarkably good return.

Where to stop the work so tomorrow can start easily

It usually helps to stop part-way through a piece of work rather than at a tidy finishing point.

In Bluma Zeigarnik’s experiments, interrupted tasks were remembered better than completed ones, though later attempts to repeat the finding have produced mixed results. Whatever the memory effect, the practical point for a handover is simpler. Resist the urge to tidy up to a clean break. Stop in the middle of a section, or even a sentence, and leave it visibly unfinished.

A neatly closed piece of work offers tomorrow nothing to take hold of. A half-finished one makes the first move obvious, so the morning begins by carrying on with something already in motion. For someone who has not yet warmed up, carrying on is a great deal easier than starting.

Why the handover has to take two minutes or less

The handover has to be short because it will most often be needed on the days when you have the least energy to give it.

A fifteen-minute end-of-day routine gets done on days when the work went well and there is something left in the tank, which are the days it matters least. On the day that overran and finished at seven, it gets skipped, and that is exactly the day with the most open items and the least written down about them.

Two minutes and four lines is about right. The routine has to survive being done badly by someone tired and slightly fed up, because that is who will usually be doing it. A version that needs a good mood will only ever record the good days, which is the same design flaw that kills most paper systems.

Where to leave the note so the morning finds it first

Leave the handover somewhere it will be the first thing you see tomorrow, ahead of any screen.

A note the next shift never reads hands nothing over. If the line lives inside a device, it sits one tap away from everything that will bury it: you open the machine, the inbox is already there, and the note now competes with whatever arrived overnight.

On paper, lying on the desk, the line is the first thing in front of you, and it has nothing else to show you. That is the entire case for the physical version, and it is a narrow one. Paper is worse at nearly everything except being the only thing in view at the moment it counts. It is also why protecting the first line of the day depends far more on sequence and placement than on resolve.

The Do One Thing diary is designed as that handover: a printed page with a line for tomorrow written tonight, a small space for where things stand, and a short weekly review. It has nothing on it that needs maintaining, which is what keeps it usable at six in the evening, when anything more demanding would be left for another day.

Each morning spent working out where you left off is a handover that never happened the night before. It costs twenty minutes at a time, and it is easy to stop paying.