The closing shift work routine has been circulating quietly on social media for some time, but the idea deserves more considered attention than a thirty-second reel tends to give it. Put plainly: it is a structured wind-down of roughly 90 minutes at the end of a working week, used to clear smaller outstanding tasks, check in with colleagues and map out the Monday ahead before you have even switched off your computer on Friday.
The concept has been taken up by Léonie Kennepohl, a female leadership expert and founder of Female x Finance, who argues that the festering anxiety many of us carry into the weekend (that low-level dread over an unfinished to-do list) is not a character flaw or a productivity failure. It is, she suggests, a structural one. The working week simply does not have a proper ending, and the brain, predictably, refuses to let go of what has been left unresolved.
Why the closing shift work routine addresses Sunday anxiety
There is something almost architectural about the idea. Most of us would not leave a physical workspace in complete disarray at the end of a shift and expect to feel calm about returning to it. And yet, intellectually, that is precisely what the open-plan knowledge worker does every Friday: tabs unclosed, emails half-drafted, tasks stranded mid-thought. The closing shift is, in essence, a deliberate act of tidying, not the desk, but the mind’s working memory of what still needs doing.
Kennepohl frames the closing shift as a technique for managing incomplete to-do lists before they metastasise into Sunday-evening anxiety. The Sunday scaries, as they are commonly known, are less about what is actually waiting on Monday and more about the uncertainty of not knowing quite what that is. A closing shift, by design, removes that uncertainty. You leave for the weekend knowing the state of play, rather than carrying a vague, unquantified sense of things undone.
How to implement a closing shift effectively
The mechanics, as Kennepohl outlines them, are straightforward. The final 90 minutes of a Friday are reserved for three distinct activities: clearing the smaller, fast-turnaround tasks that have been quietly accumulating all week; aligning with colleagues on anything that might otherwise stall or create confusion over the following days; and planning concretely for Monday, so that the week’s first morning has shape and direction rather than beginning in a fog of reprioritisation.
The ordering matters. Clearing minor tasks first creates a sense of forward motion. Colleague alignment next ensures nothing will ambush you on Monday morning via someone else’s inbox. Planning last means the week ahead is mapped while the current week’s context is still fresh, rather than reconstructed from scratch on Monday when that context has largely dissolved.
What the closing shift is not, and this distinction is worth holding onto, is a licence to work later or compress a full afternoon’s worth of effort into a tighter frame. The 90-minute boundary is part of the point. It creates a container. Tasks that cannot fit within it are not abandoned; they are acknowledged, logged and deliberately parked, which is an entirely different psychological experience from simply running out of time and hoping for the best.
Kennepohl’s broader argument is that female professionals in particular carry a disproportionate cognitive load around work left unfinished, which makes the closing shift not merely a productivity tool but something closer to an act of self-preservation. The technique is simple enough that it requires no new software, no management sign-off and no restructuring of the working day. It asks only for 90 minutes of intention, once a week, directed at the gap between where the week ends and where the next one begins.
