Although each day has 24 hours, most of our lives feel like they only have two parts work and getting ready for work again.
For many, many years, this was my reality in banking.
Long hours, high pressure, constantly exhausted.
But at the same time I really wanted to build a business, maintain a social life, see my friends and family have regular day nights and find time to work out.
So I had to confront a brutal reality.
And that was that my evenings and my free time were disappearing.
And I needed to figure out where they were going.
I'd finally discovered five solutions that completely changed how I use my time after work.
And so, in this video, I want to share the exact solutions that will help you find time to start that business, learn a new skill, or to simply just stop wasting your evening and start using them for what actually matters to you.
Let's start with rewrite your default settings.
The biggest hack I found for not wasting your evenings is separating your actions from your mood.
For most people, the two are inseparable.
The link between them is unbreakable.
And when I worked for an organization, this was my default every evening.
Bad day, spend the evening scrolling through social media.
Tired, call it quits.
Stressed, everything can wait till tomorrow.
But what if we can break that connection?
We can rewire that programming not by denying our feelings, but instead by accepting our feelings and then rewriting our next line of code.
Your default programming says, I'm tired, therefore I can't.
But you can update this code to, I'm tired and I'm going to do it tired anyway.
Or I'm tired and I'm going to do it and I could rest on the weekend.
Think about it.
You've already done this countless times in your life.
Times when you may have gone to the gym even though you didn't feel like it, or pushed through work despite being completely exhausted.
There is evidence that you can separate your actions from your mood.
Each time you take action, despite not feeling it, you're building evidence.
Evidence that you can do things tired.
Evidence that you can make progress while stressed.
And the more evidence you collect, the stronger this muscle becomes.
Your mood doesn't have to dictate your evening.
You can be tired and productive.
You can be stressed and moving forward.
It's not about feeling good first.
It's about taking action regardless of how you feel.
Number two, optimize your life math.
Everything we do falls into three buckets fundamental, fun and future.
So thinking about money first.
If you look at your spending, part of your spending goes towards your fundamental expenses things like your bills, your groceries, your basic needs.
Part of your spending, or your take-home pay, goes towards the fun area of your life your social life, your hobbies, your eating out, your holidays and then part of your spending goes towards your future.
So this might be your skills, your growth or your investments.
It's a pretty simple breakdown, but here's the truth.
Most people's fundamentals, ie their basic living spending eats up so much money that there's very rarely anything left for the fun or the future part of it.
Now what's really interesting is your time and energy work in a really similar way.
Your fundamentals are your chores, your admin work, your life maintenance, the things that just keep your life ticking by.
The fun is your social life and your hobbies.
And then your future is things like learning a new skill or building your side business or working on your career growth.
And just like money, most people's fundamentals consume a huge amount of their time.
Their life maintenance doing the laundry, checking emails, cleaning the house, sorting out bills cooking, cleaning.
While you can't eliminate these life chores, you can optimize them.
And I found this was one of the best ways to make or to free up more time that I could use in my evenings.
I started with bulk organization.
So I tackled all my household chores on a Sunday evening.
I decided what I was going to wear for the week on a Sunday.
It's an intense few hours, but it frees up my entire week.
I did things like meal prepping.
I focused two or three hours on a Sunday, which saved me over six hours during the week that I otherwise would have been cooking dinner.
Every minute that you save from working on your fundamental life admin is a minute that you can invest instead in your fun or your future time.
Think about what you can do when you free up those extra five hours a week because you've taken on those tasks on a Sunday instead of every evening.
Another way to free up time is by having someone or something help you do the thing you need to do faster and better.
According to a report by Forbes, we spend, on average, 88 of our work week communicating, with written communication taking up the largest amount of time.
Whether it's writing an important document, preparing a presentation, crafting a persuasive email, writing up a pitch, written communication plays such an important part of our working lives.
And so the ability to do it well and to do it quickly can be an absolute game changer.
And that is where the sponsor of today's video comes in, which is a tool that I pretty much use on a daily basis.
And that is Grammarly.
Grammarly is an AI writing partner that helps me write better and faster.
Unlike any other platform or app that I've come across, its features integrate across everything.
It checks my emails as I write them on Gmail.
It rephrases things to make it sound a certain way.
And one of my favorite features with the pro version is that it will check what I've written and then anticipate in advance what kind of questions or concerns someone would have when reading what I've written.
And then I will suggest ways in which you could fill those gaps up front.
As I've been growing my business and more and more people are joining.
This has been so helpful in keeping an open line of constant communication without spending hours trying to wonder if the message is clear and if it makes sense.
The other thing I love is that it connects to a load of other apps, just making the entire flow of work a lot more seamless and quick.
I don't need to open and close tabs constantly or find the right app to source a document.
With Grammarly Pro, it's all in one seamless place.
If you want to check it out, head to grammarlycom.
Forward slash Nisha, that's N-I-S-C-H-A and save hours each week to reallocate on the things that matter.
The next point we have is change your first destination.
At The moment you walk through your door after work and sit on that couch, it's over.
And that was my default for so long.
Walk in, drop my bag, sink into the couch like it's quicksand.
Just five minutes, I'll tell myself.
And then three hours later, I'll still be there.
Four episodes deep into whatever Netflix decided to autoplay next.
And there's a research paper that actually shows how, even though people think they're making choices all the time, many of our repeated behaviors are cued by everyday environments.
And I realized how much of a difference this makes when one day I had booked a Pilates class at 8 pm.
And I'd finished everything I needed to do at work.
I could have left at 6 p.m.
But there wasn't enough time to go home and come back.
So I just stayed in the office.
I opened up my laptop and I started working on my YouTube channel.
That evening I got more done in two hours than I had in weeks altogether of planning to work on it after I got home, and that's when it clicked.
Don't fight the couch magnetism, just avoid it completely.
Pack your gym clothes and go straight to the workout.
Take your laptop to a cafe and work on that side project you've been putting off straight after work.
The key is to intercept yourself before you hit that environment that triggers your default evening wasting routine.
By changing where you go right after work, you change what you do with your entire evening.
It's really that simple.
Next, we have use your best hours.
I know we're talking about how to not waste your evenings after work, but I feel like this is one of the most underrated time hacks on the list.
And that is that your morning hours are actually worth so much more than your evening hours.
Think about your typical evening work session.
You've got your notifications popping up.
Your friends are maybe texting about plans.
Plus your brain's been making decisions all day.
It's trying to run on an empty battery.
Now compare that to a 6am or a 7am you.
No messages, no emails come through yet, no one posting Instagram stories that you need to check.
Just pure, uninterrupted focus time.
When I switched my side projects from evening to mornings, I got more done in 30 minutes than I did in almost two hours after work.
We all have the same 24 hours, but not all the hours are created equal.
That evening hour you spend forcing yourself to work.
It might be worth just 20 minutes of fresh morning brain time.
So don't just rely on not wasting your after work evenings.
There are days where you're not going to be able to pick up or do whatever you need to do, maybe because you have other external commitments.
But that morning time, that is a sacred time where the world is still quiet and your mind is still fresh.
You may as well utilize that.
Next, we have respect your foundation.
This is essentially to look after yourself.
You literally will not have the energy or the motivation or the discipline to be productive after an entire 8 or 9 or 10 or 11 hour workday if you're not looking after yourself and respecting your body and your brain.
By eating badly or skipping exercise or not looking after yourself, you're performing below your max.
It's going to be impacting your productivity, your mood, your motivation.
And I can tell you this from experience.
For a good couple of years, I was barely sleeping.
I was doing like five or six hours a night.
I was surviving or pushing through on coffee.
I was constantly feeling drained.
And when you're pursuing meaningful goals or activities at the end of your day.
It is so much easier to do when you're happy and when you're healthy and when you're well rested and when you're energized.
And what that actually means in practice.
It means exercising as much as you can, learning how to eat healthy, prioritizing seven to nine hours of sleep, drinking more water, limiting your screen time, taking care of your mental health.
It won't be obvious just how far below your peak potential you're currently operating until you start looking after yourself properly.
This isn't something that I can convince you on.
It's really something that you just have to trust me on and experience for yourself.
So those are the things I did to stop wasting my evenings after work.
If you liked this video, you might also enjoy this video right here on six habits.
That made me six figures by 25.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you there.
