Closing Duties
A pre-bedtime routine to set Future You up for success.
On one of my thrifting runs this year, I picked up KC Davis’s How to Keep House While Drowning. I don’t think that I’d heard of this book beforehand, but I loved the title and love the learn-in-intense-detail-about-other-people’s-weird-routines genre*, so it was a must-buy. (*The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is the classic, of course, and I also love Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artist’s Work.)
I wrote in my 2023 in Books post about some of the things I enjoyed from this book, but one practice that I totally love is closing duties. Davis adapts this staple of the service industry–a checklist of tasks that need to be done before closing up shop so that whoever opens in the morning is prepped to go–and applies it to life in her household. She encourages thinking about your and any other household members’ future selves and creating a checklist of things that you (individually or collectively) do to set Future You up for success.
It’s really just an evening routine, but the key is that it’s a routine that is forward thinking. I have done bedtime routines for a long time, and those are great for winding down and getting ready for sleep. “Closing duties” though, are a pre-bedtime routine.
The first step, Davis suggests, is to frame closing duties as a kindness to Future You. Does Future You NEED coffee right away in the morning? Then set out those supplies for your pour over or pre-program the coffee maker. Will Future You only eat a granola bar if lunch isn’t ready to grab on your way out the door? Then make that sandwich.
Future You is different from Future Me, and closing duties should be tailored to the business of your life. My closing duties are set up to address a few specific problems in my household:
–having to work to clear the counter so I have space to make coffee in the morning, and then having to wait another 10-15 minutes for the coffee to brew
–waking up my husband because I’m rummaging in the closet late at night trying to find whatever I just sold on eBay
–resenting finding dirty things scattered around the house (see my post on The Tidying Song)
–not being able to find my journal in the morning
–waking up to no clean cups to pack to daycare
–waking up and having no idea what to put in the toddler’s lunch
–eating granola bars for lunch
–not knowing what to wear
–the dog waking me up in the middle of the night because we forgot to let her out before bed
So here is my current list of closing duties, which I keep on the side of the fridge:
I try to start on the list pretty much as soon as I get home with my daughter from daycare. She LOVES to eat, so I can park her at the table with half a slice of bread while my husband is prepping dinner and I get tomorrow’s lunch together and start on the dishes. The baby is still pretty into doing whatever we’re doing, and with the exception of packing things to ship, she likes being around while I’m getting a start on these closing duties. And then, more often than not, I have some time to chill after she has gone to bed. YES.
I/We don’t do all of the closing duties every night. Sometimes we are just too tired. But I’m generally not too bothered if it doesn’t all happen. Usually we get to most of them, and because the practice is framed as a kindness to Future Me, I can be retrospectively grateful for whatever we’ve done. Thanks to KC Davis for the compassionate take on household management!
