5 Things I Did To Stop Wasting My Evenings After Work

The difference between dreaming about your goals and actually achieving them is potentially in just four hours a day. I wasted my evenings for years, but once I started doing these five things, my life changed forever. I'm gonna share them with you, but first I have to tell you about the evening power switch, which is the system that makes everything make sense so that I can make the most of my evenings and not let productivity fall to the wayside. Here's the evening power switch. It's three phases, the power up, the power through, and the power down. The power up is a critical moment. This is when you get home from work and you typically would switch into sweatpants and maybe pour yourself a glass of wine, which would dictate the state that you're going to be in for the rest of the day. Even if you plan on making dinner and doing some household chores, you have defaulted to winding down and just kind of blowing with the wind. But we're not gonna do that. We are powering up into the state that we want to be in to do the things we actually want to do. So what do you need to do in your power up state? Do you need to dance the sillies out, sing to the top of your lungs, put on a specific outfit, go to a designated area? Choose what your power up is going to be so that you tell your body that yes, while we are done with this part of our day, we're switching gears into this one. Just like if you were to say go out to dinner, you would change into a go out to dinner outfit. If you were gonna go to an evening yoga class, you would change into your yoga gear. Those are things that you might do. But if you are planning on using your evenings to do something more productive in your own life that maybe somebody else isn't holding you accountable on, you need to be really intentional about how you decide to power up. For me, my power up is I don't want my day to just fall apart just because the kids come home from school and I'm gonna hang out with them. We're not just gonna sit around and watch TV. I wanna power up and have an intentional evening with them. If you're a side hustler, you might have to power up into your side hustle. How do you switch gears into the business so that you make the most of that core last couple of hours of the day? Choose intentionally what your power up is going to look like, and you'll be more likely to follow the standards of getting something done. The next phase is to power through. This is that core thing that you want to make happen in your evening. For me, it's an intentional activity with my kids. For you, it might be working on a specific project for your side hustle. Maybe you're planning on writing a book, and that power through is the time that you spend writing a few pages. Whatever your power through is, plan on it, and know exactly where it's going to happen, what you need to have in terms of candles lit, music on. Get into the mode so your brain feels like it knows what it's supposed to be doing. If you know the rule is don't turn the TV on, you don't turn the TV on, because we're powering through. If you're more likely to flip on the news, you're gonna start to power down, and we're not ready for that yet. Set a timer. How long does the power through last? Is it an hour? Is it an hour and a half? What are you doing with that time? And how long are you going to spend in that mode? Set the intention and follow through. And finally, the power down. This is the respect for the fact that your body does want to shut down for the day, that it does need rest, that it is going to be sleeping in the near future. So what do you do to set yourself up for success? Most people would see this as a nighttime routine. What do you do to tell your body it's time to go to sleep? I do this with my kids. If I want them to be asleep by a certain time, they need to power down. I do a lot of the same things with my kids so that they know, oh, I know what's coming. I'm going to my bed soon. Depending on how old they are, they might push back on that, but they still understand what's happening. And that's the same for us as adults. What do you tell yourself every night that indicates it's time to go to sleep soon? So when I share the five things that have absolutely changed my life in the evenings, recognize that they kind of fit into their own phases, and those phases might really help you to add more intention to your evenings. All right, now that we understand the process that makes this successful, these are the five things that changed everything in my life by making the most of my evenings. Number one, set a bedtime alarm. A bedtime alarm is very simple. It's just like a wake-up alarm, except it's telling you to go to bed. A good bedtime alarm is going to say you need to be asleep by this time, and so therefore, we're telling you in advance so that you can begin to get into that sleepy time mode. This is your power down. If you have a great bedtime alarm, it will tell you when your power down has started, maybe an hour to an hour and a half before you're meant to be asleep. I like an hour and a half because that means I have an hour left to do what I got to do from a power down state, and then I'm going to give myself about 30 minutes in bed to actually fall asleep. I don't get in bed and think I should go to sleep right now. I get in bed thinking I better be asleep in the next 30 minutes, so you've got to reverse engineer that to the best of your ability. Before I get into number two, I've got to tell you we have a goal on this channel to hit 500,000 subscribers, so if you haven't done it already, please take a moment to click the subscribe button. Number two, stop romanticizing dinner. I talked about this in a video called How to Live in 24 Hours a Day. While this book is a little dated and definitely antiquated, it had some really interesting things to say about dinner time. How much are we defaulting to a long dinner for no reason if it's just wasting the rest of our day? Now, there's something to be said about family dinners and that intention of coming together over food and connecting with each other, but you can have strong, meaningful connection with your family or the people that are close to you without making yourself sit through a meal that might make you more sleepy, more tired, and less productive than you otherwise would be. How can you think about dinner as fuel for something that you can still do very intentionally with the people you love? So not romanticizing dinner, although very against the grain from where I come from or where my husband comes from, is something that changed everything for us because when we look at food as fuel and then look at how we want to spend that fuel, we have a whole block of time at the end of the day that we can do something together as a family other than defaulting to the couch and sweatpants and watching TV, or worse, sitting at the table eating food for like three hours while the TV's on and it all kind of blending together. There's nothing wrong with a big, beautiful family dinner if that is what you actually do. But stop romanticizing dinner as that core activity at the end of the day if it is not making life better for everyone involved. One of our favorite things to do is to get completely out of that mindset of go home, eat dinner, go to bed. So we might decide, okay, we're gonna meal prep our evening dinner and we're gonna put it in a little lunchbox, take it on the go. Maybe we're eating in the car on the way to a more fun event. So we get enough protein in, we have a nice little meal. It's not this big dinner that's gonna make us tired. It's enough so that we can go to a park together or go check out the aquarium or just drive around because we wanna check out our neighborhood and be tourists in our area. There are so many things that you can do if you just wanted to, but you might have to get yourself to think a little bit differently than what you're used to. Number three, implement the two minute rule. Successful people do not do things because they love every single thing that they do. Successful people do things they know they have to do because they stick to a standard. So if you're just getting used to this idea of making your evenings more intentional, maybe it's because you do need to side hustle. You're trying to make more money for your life and you can only do it in the hours that you have available. You might have to push yourself to get some momentum. So I like the two minute rule for this. The two minute rule is simple. Set a timer for two minutes and agree that you will at least start the task you said you were gonna do and do it for two minutes. Now, make sure you've set yourself up for success. If you were going to start writing your book, then make sure you have some focus music on, you lit the candles, you did the whole thing so that your two minutes is the best two minutes of writing possible. Because if you do that, if you go in at 100% for just the two minutes, who says you can't get to three? Who says you can't get to five? Who says maybe you end up there for 30 minutes? And you go, wow, 30 minutes flew by, I got a whole page. Okay, I'm gonna continue on for the next 30 minutes because I said I was actually gonna do this for an hour and I feel better about it now. The start is the hardest part, but you have to keep going. So challenge yourself to just spend two minutes on something and see what happens. And if it's not working, it's not working. But you put yourself in that state, you got your head there, you got your ears there, you got your hands there, you're ready to go, you at least got yourself there. So it's so much harder to get out of it if you gave yourself a running start. Two minutes, give yourself the two minute rule. See how much better you do. Number four, write the win list. I love the win list. A lot of people like to write their gratitude list. A lot of people like to write what happened during the day that went really well. Those are all fantastic. I hope you write any list at the end of a day that fills your cup and makes you feel successful. For me, it's the win list. The win list is a one to three item list of things that if I were to do them tomorrow, that the next day, tomorrow will be a win. It could be one thing. If you are out of shape, haven't been working out, you're gonna start taking care of your body and you wanna go to the gym, that might be a very big thing for you and that should be the only thing on your win list. Don't make it a long list. The win list is that core list of things that literally move the needle for you, literally move the needle for you, make you feel like you moved mountains. It should not be a task list of all the things you gotta do tomorrow. What would make tomorrow a win? Showing up for work tomorrow is your default. That doesn't go on your win list. You're probably gonna do that anyway. What are the things that would make the difference to you? That's the win list. I like to write a win list at the end of the night because then I start thinking and I want to think about those things because I'm more likely to have solved some problems by the next day if I slept really well and I might be problem solving on some of the biggest things I have to do tomorrow if I am intentionally planning to do them. So the win list might help give you direction on how you spend that time in the evening. What do you do during the power through phase? Write yourself a win list, make the plan, set the intention, and make it happen. And number five, no bedroom TV at least on weeknights. Now I used to have a house that made this so easy because having a TV in my bedroom was just like annoying. It looked bad, there was no room for it. It was a smaller room. So it was easy to not have a TV in my bedroom and only go to my bedroom to sleep. But now I do have a TV in my bedroom for weekends only. I will maybe let myself do a little bit of binging on a Saturday night. It just depends. But my TV does not get turned on on a weeknight unless I'm turning on some kind of zen environmental music that makes me more sleepy in my power down time. I do not watch sitcoms or movies or even drama series that I'm completely obsessed with on weeknights because it stimulates my brain way too much. I do not power down. And my bedroom has now become a viewing area instead of a sleeping area. That changed everything from a stimulation standpoint in my life when I stopped looking at the TV as something that carried over room to room. There's TV in the living room. There might be TV in like a movie room in your house. But there's not TV time in the bedroom most of the time because you respect the power down for what it needs to be. If you look at your bedroom as a place to sleep and that's it, it gets a lot easier to sleep when you go there. Those are the five things I did to stop wasting time in the evenings and be more productive after work. 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