Shut down your...apps (not Chrome, that’s for tomorrow)
If you hit the “shutdown” button on your computer right now, it would give you a list of open applications that it wants to confirm that you want to close. Those are all the apps open and running on your computer. More likely than not the hardest one to close is going to be your browser (Chrome, right?), possibly followed by an office product (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), and then whatever else you use on a daily basis (I’ve got Zoom, Slack, Notepad, Dashlane, a screenshot tool called Movavi, aText, and more).
Why are all these apps open? Some may just be hanging out in the background, but others are open because you are “currently working with them.” And by that I mean, you were working on them, but you either got distracted and started working in something else, or you didn’t finish whatever you were doing in the app and now that it is computer shut-down time you are faced with the choice of either finishing the thing you were working on or putting it to the side for now.
Unlike the ability to leave emails in your inbox, you can’t really leave any apps open if you are going to be shutting down your computer. So you’ll need to take a few easy steps, some of which will feel very familiar from yesterday:
Look at each app and if you need to, SAVE YOUR WORK.
If the app you are using is something like an office app (Excel, Word, PowerPoint) where your work may not be automatically saved in the system itself, then you’ll want to save your work somewhere ORGANIZED. Nothing should go to your desktop or star it or some other way that you think you are “flagging” it for yourself for later. Nope. Don’t do that. Cut that out!
If you are in the middle of a bigger task or project, add it to your to-do list, or your task management system, or wherever you are keeping those same tasks that you created to empty your email inbox.
You’ll need some notes to yourself about where you left off and where you want to pick up next. That will really help.
Say goodnight and close the app, feeling good about it!
So why didn’t we talk about closing your browser? Well, your browser has this really special thing called Tabs, and getting to Tab Zero is a whole other kind of skill to have, which we’ll be diving into tomorrow!
