6 Things I Did to STOP Wasting My Evenings After Work

Have you ever wanted to be productive after work, but you just feel constantly exhausted? That was pretty much my life for a very long time. So eight years ago, I was trapped in a job that made me feel hopeless, right? I remember feeling really, really happy and excited on Fridays, but then completely numb again on Sundays. And you know, the scariest part wasn't that I was living this life every day. It was realizing that this would be the rest of my life, unless I change something. Like, I dreamed of starting my own business, but I never had the time or energy to actually do it until I discovered these six things that helped me stop wasting my evenings after work. Today, I want to share what worked for me to help you free up your time so you can start that side hustle, so you can learn that new skill or do whatever it is that makes you happy. The first thing is to force a transitional activity. Like, I still remember getting home after commuting for one to two hours. I'd lay on the couch, I'd open my computer, and I'd tell myself, I'm just going to watch one episode of The Office to relax before I start working on my own thing. And then five hours later, I am still binging The Office. And for the longest time, I could not figure out how to snap out of this cycle. But then I came across this research paper that says, basically says that when one part of your brain or your body is exhausted, you should use the non-exhausted part to kind of reset your energy levels. And I only realized how much of a difference is actually made when one day I got home early-ish after work around 7 p.m. And since there was still light outside, I just dropped all my bags at home and I started to walk around the block. And surprisingly, when I got home, I actually felt like working on my YouTube channel, right? I actually felt energized. I actually felt focused. And that's when it clicked. You need a transitional activity to reset yourself. And here's what that means and how you can do it. Number one, if you are mentally exhausted after work, like you used a lot of your brain power, you need to reset your mental energy level by doing something physical, like going to the gym or going on a walk or cooking. And number two, if you are physically exhausted after work, like you need to do the complete opposite, right? You need to use your mental energy. You need to sit on the couch, listen to music, draw, whatever. Just use your brain and use your mental energy. The key here is to switch between different types of activities so you can give your overused parts of your system time to recover while using the underutilized areas. And that brings us to the second thing, which is to work with your chronotype, not against it. And I know this video is about using your evenings after work more effectively, but you really should be productive based on your genetic programming. And this is something that I've learned the hard way, right? So for years, I tried to join the 5am hustle culture club because I convinced myself that I needed to be a part of this club and wake up really early if I wanted to get stuff done. But there's actually research that shows that your body has natural energy cycles based on your genetics. And just forcing yourself to work outside of these natural energy cycles is like building furniture without any instructions. The trick is, instead of working against your genetics and your chronotype, you want to work with it. And here's how you figure this out. Number one, look back at your days and your nights and ask yourself, do you feel more mentally sharp in the morning or in the evenings? By the way, if you naturally wake up in the afternoon on the weekends, you're probably not a morning person. Number two, instead of forcing yourself to be a morning person or a night owl, pick one that you are naturally acclimated to. So if you feel more naturally sharp in the morning, then wake up earlier to work in the mornings and sleep earlier in the evenings. If you're sharper in the evenings, then just sleep later so you can work in the evenings and just wake up later. The point is, swimming with the currents and the ocean is a lot easier than swimming against them. The next thing is to give yourself a one rule other day, which is actually how I learned to avoid burning out after burning out for so many times. So a lot of people don't realize this, but the secret to achieving your goals and success or whatever that is for you is really just about being extremely consistent at something for an overwhelmingly long period of time. It's kind of like the tortoise and the hare fable that we heard when we were younger, right? You will get much further if you go slow and steady rather than if you do an insane sprint and then you chill and burn out for a few days. And I can tell you this from experience. If you didn't know, I am a type A person. Shocker, right? And I used to have this ridiculous belief that if I wasn't productive every single day, then I was slacking off. And it became this like gnawing feeling in the back of my head. Like I would feel guilty if I wasn't being productive. So that's kind of what I forced myself to do, right? My schedule was wild for a very, very long time. I only let myself sleep maybe four hours a night and I was surviving on loads and loads of caffeine and melatonin. And surprise, surprise, I burned out. And when you burn out, you just stop caring about everything. I constantly made excuses to avoid hanging out with friends. I slacked off at work. I barely did any work. And I just felt like this passenger, right? In my body for weeks until I finally got over my burnout. The thing is your body and your mind, they run in cycles, right? It always follows a pattern. There's push, rest, and repeat. Push, rest, and repeat. And if you disrupt this rest part for a really long time, then your body and your mind is going to start to deteriorate. And one of the best ways I've discovered to avoid burnout is by following this thing called the one rule other day strategy. And here's how you do it. Number one, give yourself permission, right? Give yourself permission to take up to two days off a week from being productive, whether that's in the evenings or in the mornings. You don't actually have to use the two days every single week, but on the days that when you come home and you are both physically and mentally exhausted and you just want to melt into your couch and watch Severance, right? That is when you take those two days. Number two, and probably the most important part of this rule is never take two other days in a row, which means that if you chill on Monday, you must work on Tuesday, okay? You cannot chill again until Wednesday. And the reason is if you give yourself an excuse to chill on days back to back, right? Your brain is going to start turning this mentality into a habit and it's going to become a lot harder for you to break out of it. Which brings me to this next point. So while I was creating this video, I did a lot of research into what other people said and what they wrote about. And there was this one topic that I noticed a lot of people missed out on, which I think is really strange because I honestly think it is the most critical part out of all of this to the point that if you don't watch any other section in this video, let this be the only section you watch. And it's simply you need proper nutrition, okay? Your body is a machine and it requires fuel to run. If you feed your machine, your body junk all the time, it's not going to run properly. For a very long time, I always tried to min-max my life, right? So naturally, I love food deals, okay? Domino's $5.99 pizza, Burger King on the app coupons, whatever, right? Anything that I could find for cheap that filled me up and lasted me a long time, I was obsessed with. So it was naturally no surprise that during this time when I was trying to get all these food deals, I never had any energy and I always felt exhausted. And there's so much research that shows that if you're not getting enough of certain nutrients or vitamins, like B vitamins, iron and omega-3s, you will feel more fatigued. You will have brain fog and you will feel a lack of motivation. And transparently, I thought this was all BS, right? One day, I was on TikTok and I got sucked into the healthy eating health algorithm and it started to slowly change my diet. It wasn't anything crazy, right? I just limited myself to maybe fast food once a week, right? I meal prepped on Sundays, so I had one less excuse to order fast food outside because I already had food at home. I tried to eat less processed foods. I started eating more whole foods, taking multivitamins and supplements. And after a few weeks of this, I noticed that I felt less tired and that I could stay focused for longer periods of time. And if you want to get started, here are two things that I recommend you do. Number one is just go to your doctor and ask for a blood test to check out if you have any vitamin deficiencies. Number two, based on the result of that, you can eat more foods with whatever you are deficient in or you can start taking supplements. Some of the most common vitamin deficiencies that the average American has is vitamin D, vitamin B12 and magnesium. And all these play a very critical role in your brain health, which is directly tied to what you're trying to achieve with this video. The point is, if you want your body to perform better for you, you need to feed it better stuff. And I'm not saying never eat junk food or never eat processed stuff. I still do it, but just do it in moderation. The next point is to start task stacking. And I figured this out when I realized that sometimes you literally do not have time to work, either because you have a very long commute, you had to work late hours, or you have responsibilities like you need to cook for your family. So instead of trying to force yourself to carve out this non-existent time out of your schedule, I personally started using what I call dead time way more effectively. For example, when I'm working out at the gym, I will catch up with the news, right? I'm going to listen to the Up First podcast or Freakonomics or Planet Money or The Indicator. When I commuted to the office or when I'm commuting on a subway, I'll script some videos on my phone. When I'm cooking dinner, I'll catch up with Severance, right? And being able to task stack successfully actually requires three specific things. Number one is you need to think about how many activities that you do every day that you only either use your brain or your body. And number two is you want to try to stack the opposite activity on top, right? If you're reading, can you do some squats? If you're commuting to the office, can you read a book? And number three, don't try to stack two activities that require your full attention. Like don't try to drive a car while reading a book. Otherwise, you're going to do both pretty poorly. Which brings me to the next point and that is to create a principal list. So instead of getting home and wondering, okay, right? What am I supposed to work on now? What am I supposed to do? And wasting precious time trying to figure out what your task should be, I would always just refer to my principal list. Like I always have it handy. So basically on Sundays, I'll just take out my trusty red notebook and I'll list out all the tasks that I want to do for that week. And I split into two main groups. One group are super high priority tasks that actually move the needle. And then the second group are just like some admin tasks that I need to work on. So I'm looking at my notebook now and it's kind of chicken scratchy. But for this past week, it was finalize the 1K savings presentation, which is I run a savings challenge every so often. If you didn't know, other things would be respond to a brand email, bring on a new virtual assistant to help out, sketch out some additional ideas and so on and so forth. And this is something that I've been doing for a while now. And it really helps me stick to my plan and really hold myself accountable. And honestly, I think Sundays are probably the best days to do it because when you create that list on Sundays, you are in a clear headspace. You are motivated, right, to start the week. Like I try to avoid making this list in the middle of the week because, you know, I might be tired. I may be exhausted. And I'll just make up some excuse for why I can't do this and that this week or next week or next month. And I'll just keep on procrastinating and pushing it back. But because I make it on Sunday, it kind of sets it in stone. It makes it a bit harder for me to move it unless it's an emergency. And sometimes what I do is if I am falling behind schedule throughout the week, I'll like take tasks from the principal list and then I'll bucket them even further. So I'll be like, OK, on Wednesday, I got to do this. On Thursday, I got to do this. So it's a little bit more organized and even more granular of an approach. And again, it helps with accountability. Now, I don't want this to be just another video that you watch that makes you feel better about yourself, right? But you end up not taking any action. And yes, I am calling you out. So I want to share two additional things that I personally do that really helps me integrate things into my life and actually take action with them. So number one is to find your minimum effective dose for change. And what that means is instead of trying to overhaul your entire life, your entire evening or morning at once, I want you to be more realistic about it, right? Think about which of these things that six things that we just went over, which of them can you easily apply that will lead to the biggest change? And personally, I think task stacking and forcing transitional activities are the easiest first steps for you to do. So I want you to do me a favor, promise that you're going to give them a try today or latest tomorrow. Number two, and probably the most important thing that really changed my life and how I became more effective with my time is understanding the Pygmalion effect and the one to principle, which I cover in very great details in this video. So best of luck with everything and see you in the next video.