Blog Single

You shut the laptop at six. Locked up, drove home, made supper.

And here you are at half past ten, lying in the dark, rewriting a R6 000 quote in your head — one you can’t send till morning anyway. Then redoing the VAT sum, because you didn’t trust it the first time. The office closed hours ago. You didn’t.

Winter’s meant to be the quiet season. So why are you more tired now than you were in the December rush?

You’ve mistaken quiet for rest

The off-season plays a quiet trick on you. The phone slows down, the diary thins out, and you assume the resting is happening on its own. It isn’t. A slow diary just hands your head more room to chew the same handful of worries, for longer.

The work followed you home anyway. It only changed shape. Now it’s the WhatsApp you answer from the couch because the tick’s gone blue and they know you’ve seen it. It’s the “quick favour” from Monday that’s quietly turned into a job. If your evenings keep filling up with those, it’s the same leak as the hours nobody paid you for — just showing up after dark instead of in the diary.

A recent Old Mutual survey of South African business owners, the first proper local one on founders and their mental health, found the average owner lying awake at 3:17 in the morning, already running the business in their head. No fire to put out. Nobody had just told the brain the day was done.

Clock off on purpose, or you won’t at all

So tonight, before you shut down, spend two minutes on it. Before, not after. Three things:

• Park tomorrow’s first job on a sticky note, so your head doesn’t have to hold it all night.
• Take the one message that’s nagging you and either send it now or decide, on purpose, that it waits till morning. Either’s fine. It’s the limbo that costs you.
• Close the laptop and put it somewhere you can’t see it from the couch.

That’s the whole ritual. You’re not booking a spa weekend or “finding balance.” You’re drawing a line under the day so it stops bleeding into the night.

Two minutes of deliberate stop beats a whole evening spent half-on and half-off, never quite working and never quite resting. Try it tonight. See if you sleep past three.

What’s the one work-worry that still finds you at 11pm? Drop it in the comments. Half this club’s lying awake with the same one, and it gets a little smaller the moment it’s out of your head and sitting in a comment box.