Day 10: Five minutes that kill the Sunday Scaries.
End-of-day routine. Five minutes before you close the laptop. Tomorrow morning, a plan instead of a panic.
Welcome to Day 10 of the challenge.
Yesterday you prepped Sunday for Monday. One-off. A specific moment for a specific knot.
Today is the version you do every day for the rest of your working life.
Five minutes at the end of every workday, before you close the laptop, that turns tomorrow morning’s panic into tomorrow morning’s plan. Same calendar and Gmail connectors you set up over the weekend. New brief. New habit.
The Sunday Scaries are real on a Sunday. They’re also real at 11pm on a Tuesday. The cure is the same.
A word before we start
Most planning advice tells you to do it in the morning. I don’t agree.
Mornings have momentum. They have energy. They have a window when you should be doing the most important work, not deciding what the most important work is. By the time you’ve finished deciding, the morning is gone.
Tomorrow’s plan belongs to tonight. Five minutes at the end of today’s work, while context is still warm, while you can still remember what’s actually in the calendar and what’s actually overdue. Future-you reads it tomorrow morning, decides nothing, just does.
This is the rhythm Week 2 was building toward. Connectors plus a prompt plus a saved file. Five minutes. Compounds across a year into something that genuinely changes how you work.
Step by step
Step 1. Pick your trigger. 5pm, 6pm, 7pm. Whenever your work day actually ends. The same time every day matters more than the specific hour.
Step 2. Open Cowork in your desktop app.
Step 3. Start a new chat. Paste this brief:
Build me tomorrow’s plan. Read tomorrow’s calendar and today’s unactioned inbox.
Give me, in this order:
1. Three things that MUST move forward tomorrow. Specific, not generic. From the calendar, the inbox or anything I’ve flagged. 2. Two things I can do tomorrow but don’t have to. Bonus territory. 3. One thing I should say no to or push back on. Be direct. Tell me what’s not earning its place in tomorrow’s day. 4. The single most important meeting tomorrow, and the one thing I should pre-think before walking in.Anything in tomorrow’s calendar that shouldn’t be there. 5. Anything I’d want to reschedule or decline if I were honest.
Before you start, ask me three clarifying questions.
Step 4. Answer Claude’s three questions. Let it run.
Step 5. Read the plan.
Push back where it got it wrong. Sample correction:
The meeting with [name] is more important than you think. Move it up. The [other meeting] isn’t actually mine to lead. Take it off the priority list.
Step 6. Save the plan. Ask Claude:
Save this as 2026-XX-XX-plan.md in my Cowork folder. One file per day. I’ll open it first thing tomorrow.
Step 7. Close the laptop. Evening starts now.
Tomorrow morning
Before email. Before Slack. Before anything.
Open the file. Read for two minutes. Decide which of the three priorities you’ll start with. Walk into the day.
You’ll find it odd at first. The instinct is to open the inbox. Resist. The plan you made last night already accounts for what’s there. Trust it.
A safety note
No new connectors today. You’re using yesterday’s calendar connector plus Day 7’s Gmail connector. Both still on read-only. Both still revocable from Settings.
If you’d rather Claude only see specific labels in Gmail when building tomorrow’s plan (work labels only, say), add this to your brief: “Only read emails labelled Work / Clients / Urgent. Skip anything in personal labels.”
What you’ll notice
The “three things that must move” list is shorter than you think it should be.
That’s not a bug. That’s the shift. Most days have three real priorities and a lot of noise. The five-minute brief surfaces the three. The noise is still there, but it stops being the thing that defines your day.
The second thing you’ll notice: evenings get quieter. The mental open loop of “I should probably think about tomorrow” closes when you actually do. The five minutes buys you the rest of the night.
The third thing: tomorrow morning starts faster. No 20-minute warm-up while you remember what you were supposed to be doing. The file already knows.
Why this works
Planning and doing are different jobs. We try to do both at once (in the morning, badly) and resent both.
Splitting them is the move. Last-night-you plans. This-morning-you does. The handoff is a saved file. Both versions of you are working at the time of day each is sharpest.
It’s the same Cowork pattern again. Claude assembles. You decide. The decision is faster because the assembly is done.
Going further (optional, +10 mins)
Once you’ve nailed the base version, layer in any of these:
1..Draft the follow-up emails. After the plan, ask:
Draft the three follow-up emails I should send tonight to close loops from today’s meetings.”
Saves you 20 minutes tomorrow.
Saves you twenty minutes tomorrow morning.
2. Cross-check Granola, Fyxer or Otter. If you use a note-taker or meeting-notes AI, drop in today’s notes alongside the brief:
Add anything from these notes that I committed to and haven’t actioned. Surface it in tomorrow’s priorities if it’s overdue.
3. Surface the buried commitments. Once a week, ask:
“Read the last seven days of sent mail. List every time I said ‘I’ll send you’ or ‘I’ll follow up’ and never did.”
This is the one people gasp at. The commitments you forgot you made, surfaced and either actioned or apologised for. Run weekly.
Key takeaway
Five minutes at the end of every workday. Calendar + inbox + one brief. Tomorrow’s plan as a saved file. Open it in the morning before anything else.
Mornings are won the night before.
Where this is heading
Two connectors. One daily ritual. You’ve now got the rhythm Week 2 was about. The rest of the week is the high-value tasks the rhythm makes possible.
Tomorrow on Switched On
Day 11: Read a 60-page research document or board pack in five minutes.
The boring document on your desk doesn’t need 45 minutes. It needs a sharper prompt. Tomorrow we hand off the doc you’ve been avoiding and Claude tells you only what you need to act on.
Nishma x
P.S. How did today land? Three buttons, thirty seconds → Tap one
I read every response. The data shapes the rest of the challenge.
Catching up? Days 0 to 9 are on the Switched On Substack archive HERE.
Got a friend or a colleague who this might be useful for? Send her to nishma.co/30daychallenge
SwitchedOn #SwitchedOnAIChallenge
