How to pick up where you left off: write a re-entry note

You sit back down after a meeting, a school run or a week away, and the first stretch of time goes on working out where you were. Which file was it? What had you decided? What were you about to try?

The fix is a small habit. Before you stop, write a re-entry note with four short parts: where you are, what you decided, what is still open and the next three actions. Then stop at a point where the next step is obvious. This post shows how to write the note, when to write it and how to make coming back after a long break less painful.

Why the restart is the expensive part

When you stop in the middle of something, the picture in your head does not get saved anywhere. You knew which paragraph needed rewriting, which number looked wrong and who you were waiting on. Come back a day later and you rebuild all of that from scraps: open files, half-read emails, a sticky note that says "check this".

Unfinished work also has a way of following you around. In a 2011 series of experiments, the psychologists E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished goals caused intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task, and that letting participants make specific plans for those goals eliminated those effects (opens in a new tab). So a written plan for unfinished work can do two jobs: it saves your place, and it can help you put the work down properly.

Switching itself has a cost too, which we look at in the real cost of context switching. The re-entry note is about the other half: making the return cheaper. For the tools PlexiDesk has for getting started and staying with it, see focus and follow-through in PlexiDesk.

The re-entry note: four short sections

A re-entry note answers the four questions you would otherwise spend the first part of your return answering. Keep each part short.

• Where you are. Two or three sentences on what you have been working on and how far you got.
• Key decisions. What you decided, and briefly why, so you don't reopen questions you have already settled.
• Open questions. What is unresolved, and who or what you are waiting on.
• Next 3 actions. Concrete, numbered steps. Make the first one small enough to start on a cold Monday morning.

Here is an example. Priya, an analyst, is halfway through a quarterly report when she leaves for two days of client visits. Her note reads:

Where you are: Sections 1 to 3 are drafted. Section 4, the regional figures, is half done: North and South are written, East and West are not started.

Key decisions: Using the revised September numbers, not the early estimates. Charts go in the appendix, not the body.

Open questions: Waiting on Tom for the West region data. Not yet sure whether to include the one-off contract.

Next 3 actions: 1. Write the East paragraph from the sheet. 2. Email Tom about the West data. 3. Decide on the one-off contract and note why.

A few things make a note like this work:

• Write it for a stranger. Future you will not remember the shorthand. Name the file, the person and the number.
• Keep it short. A few lines under each heading is plenty. If the note runs to pages, it has become a report.
• Keep it with the work. A note in a separate app or on a loose piece of paper is one more thing to find. Put it in the folder, the document or the workspace where the work lives.
• Date it. "Waiting on Tom" means something different after two days than after two weeks.

If you use PlexiDesk, you don't have to write the note from scratch: its Resume button drafts one from what is on your desk, under these same four headings. More on that below.

Stop where the next step is obvious

The second half of the habit is choosing where to stop. The natural instinct is to stop at a clean break, such as the end of a section or a finished email. The trouble is that a clean break leaves you facing a blank start when you return.

Try stopping just past the break instead:

• Start the next piece. Write the first sentence of the next section, or the heading of the next slide, then stop.
• Leave a breadcrumb. If you are in the middle of something fiddly, a one-line comment such as "next: fix the totals in column F" tells you exactly where to pick up.
• Make the first action tiny. "Open the sheet and write the East paragraph" is easier to start than "finish section 4".

For the end of the day, a short shutdown routine puts it together:

1. Write or update the re-entry note for whatever you were working on.
2. Close anything that is finished, so tomorrow's view is not cluttered with it.
3. Check that tomorrow's first action is small and clear.

Unplanned stops get a shorter version. When the phone rings or someone appears at your desk, one line is enough: "Next: email Tom about the West data." Write it before you turn away if you can.

Let your workspace remember the rest

A note captures your thinking. A workspace that keeps your place captures everything else: the files, the pages and the half-finished sheet. In PlexiDesk each piece of work gets its own desk, and the desk stays as you left it. As our page on desks in PlexiDesk puts it: "Close a desk and the clutter goes with it. Open it tomorrow and you pick up exactly where you stopped."

PlexiDesk also has tools for each part of coming back:

• Resume writes the note for you. On an open desk, click Resume (the document icon among the desk's quick actions in the header), then Generate resume. Plexii, the assistant, writes a handoff note from what is on the desk, under the same four headings: Where you are, Key decisions, Open questions and Next 3 actions. It keeps the note under 250 words and saves it with the desk, so it is waiting next time you click Resume. Regenerate writes a fresh note from the desk as it is now. Writing the note does not change anything on the desk. Resume needs AI to be set up: PlexiDesk credits while you are signed in, or your own Anthropic key. See write a handoff note with Resume.
• Where was I takes you straight back. The Where was I widget on your Home dashboard shows the desk you last worked on, how long ago that was and the last web page you opened in PlexiDesk, with a Resume button that opens the desk. It needs no AI.
• Continue reopens your documents. The Continue widget lists the documents you edited most recently, so the report you were halfway through is one click away.

Resume writes from what is on the desk, so the more of your thinking is there, the better the note. Before you stop, jot what you were about to do on a sticky, then generate the note. The next three actions will start from where you really left off.

After a long break: find what went quiet

After a holiday or a busy fortnight on something else, the hard part is not one task but all of them. Resist starting from your inbox, which hands your first hour to whoever wrote last. Instead:

1. List what was in progress before you left.
2. Read the re-entry notes for each piece of work, if you wrote them.
3. Decide for each one: carry on, finish it off, or park it on purpose.
4. Pick one to restart and give it a small first step. If even that feels heavy, try a five-minute start.

The work that quietly stopped is easy to miss. In PlexiDesk, the Stalled desk widget points to the desk marked In progress that has gone longest without a change, once it has waited three days or more. Click it to open the desk, then pick it up, mark it Done or put it away. The widget works from your desks' status and from changes to the desk itself, such as its name or status, so mark a desk In progress when you start it and Done when you finish. For a fuller list, the Attention widget on Home has a Stale desks section that lists open desks with no change for seven days or more.

A re-entry note is written for you. If someone else will pick the work up, they need more context than your own shorthand, so see our project handover checklist for what to pass on.

Write one note today, before you stop, and see how the next return feels. For the other tools that help you start and finish work, see focus and follow-through in PlexiDesk.