How to Create a Life Changing Afternoon Routine 🧠🧚🌱⏱

In this video, I am talking about improving your leg via an afternoon routine. So we're gonna cover a few things in this video, including how to create a more enjoyable afternoon routine, how to create energy in your afternoon, because that's like one of the toughest things, how to switch to afternoon mode, and some of the habits that I think make the biggest impact in an afternoon routine. Let's start with how to increase your energy in the afternoon, because I think that's one of the things that is the most difficult to get past. If you don't have the energy to do your afternoon routine, it makes everything a lot harder. Let's be clear. The 9 to 5 was designed by Henry Ford for factory workers on assembly lines, who were basically treated like human robots. Back then, someone was often at home, being a housekeeper, the chef, taking care of the kids, doing all of the mental and household work. Expecting a ton of energy from yourself when you get home is unkind and unrealistic. If you find that you struggle with energy in the afternoon, treat yourself with kindness and gentleness. In saying that, here are the things that help me the most when I'm having a low energy afternoon. Don't sit down. So my go-to rule whenever I'm feeling demotivated is go slow, don't stop, which should already be in your toolkit if you've watched my videos enough. And this is another one to add, which is don't sit down. If your immediate instinct when you walk in the door is to lie down on your bed, whip out your phone, repeat that rule in your mind as soon as you get home. Don't sit down. Don't sit down until you've done at least the future Utah that you know that you need to do to feel good tomorrow. If your go-to is sitting on your phone when you get home, have a phone home, like a drawer, a box, whatever. Put your phone on airplane mode, put it in your phone home. Don't get it out until you've done your things. Have a future self and a present self checklist. So one of the biggest reasons that we don't do anything with our afternoons or the biggest reason that we don't do anything with our time full stop is that we have a lack of clarity around what we want to be doing. And when you mix a lack of clarity with a lack of energy after work, you're pretty much creating a little recipe for four hours of TikTok. If you watch one of my recent videos on how I got out of a little mini slump, I created two checklists, a present self checklist and a future self checklist. Think of your afternoon routine in the same way. You should have some tasks that are for your future self that you'll reap the rewards from later. You should also have tasks that are for your present self. Having this list will give you clarity on what you want to do. So you'll walk into your house and you'll know exactly what you want to do with your afternoon routine. You want to make this list a physical list because even having to go into your phone and draw up the list in whatever app you use is too much energy for you to be exerting in an afternoon. Too much mental work. To cater to my low motivation brain, I like to make a list that spoon feeds me and I write the tasks that I want to do, but I also write the first steps of each task. So maybe all you want to do in the afternoon is create a cute little collage, but you struggle to get started. On your list, write, make a cute collage and write the task before that task. So get the collage books off of my bookshelf. You don't need to write down every step of your task, just enough to create momentum. Even better, if you have present self tasks that you want to do, lay that stuff out in the morning for yourself. Use your morning energy and motivation to make your night flow easily. Non-sleep deep rest. This is my favorite thing to do when I am feeling low on motivation and low on energy. It's basically like a nap, but you take away that gross after nap feeling. Non-sleep deep rest is kind of a form of meditation, but it's done lying down. And you can just look up on YouTube non-sleep deep rest tracks. You're gonna find one. To do non-sleep deep rest, you lie down for 20 minutes, you follow the guidance and it feels kind of like you've had a shot of coffee afterwards, but you aren't gonna be mucking up with your sleep later on. Afterwards, get up, have a snack, have some water. I treat non-sleep deep rest as almost a divider in your day. After non-sleep deep rest, your afternoon really starts. Low energy visible reward tasks first. So a lot of the productivity advice that you're gonna see in the world is do the hard thing first, eat the frog, get the difficult thing out of the way. In the afternoon, that doesn't make any sense. In the afternoon is where your resistance to do things is probably going to be the highest. You've spent so much of your energy, you've made so many decisions in your day, you don't wanna be trying to get yourself to do difficult things first. So what you need to do is pepper in little, easy, low energy, but high reward tasks. So here are a few low energy, but high and visible reward tasks that you can do in your afternoon routine. Having one space that you tidy when you get home. Secondly, you could do a quick brain dump of everything on your mind. The reward for a brain dump isn't actually visible, but you can really feel it internally. Thirdly, you could have a shower. It's a boring, but easy task. And once you are showered in your PJs, your face is cleansed and moisturized within like 20 minutes of getting home, it creates this weird energy where you feel like, wow, I have a whole night ahead of me. It's like getting dressed for the day. And lastly, do a little life admin task. So keep a list of those low energy and high reward tasks and complete just one when you get home. Have a bell. This is a side note for anyone that works from home. Have a bell that tells you when you finish work and have a bell that tells you that you're going to finish work in 20 minutes. I have two alarms set on my Google Home, one for 4.40 and one for 5 p.m. One saying, hey, you got 20 minutes. And the other is saying, leave your desk now. It's time, get up, but in a gentler way. And I need it. It's necessary for me to get up and start doing my afternoon routine because otherwise your work and your life, they really do start to melt together when you work from home. Having an audible alarm that says not time to stop is essential. You don't have people telling you to stop work. So give yourself a bell. Now let's talk about afternoon routine habits. I always recommend creating routines that are not fancy. A few little things will do. Just like you don't need a nine-step skincare routine, you really do not need a nine-step morning routine or a nine-step afternoon routine. It's too much. It's overwhelming. It's not sustainable. Give yourself just a handful of things that you really see the value in doing. And you don't wanna fill your plate with vegetables either. Like you want the yummy stuff and the veggies. In saying that, here's a quick rapid fire list of things that you can pepper into your afternoon routine that are going to make a big difference in your tomorrow. Firstly, tasks that remove your decisions from your tomorrow. Some ideas are laying out your workout clothes, laying out your work clothes, opening up your writing app on your computer so you're all set up for when you wake up in the morning. If you're journaling in the morning, laying out your journal and a pen. If you're meditating in the morning, picking the meditation that you wanna do in the morning. Choosing the book that you'll read tomorrow. Write a plan for tomorrow. So you can use a planner, kind of like the ones that I sell, or you can literally get out a little post-it note, write three to dos on it so you know exactly what you are doing with your day when you wake up. Make your dinner and a little bit more for your tomorrow's lunch. That's you removing as many decisions from your tomorrow as possible. Secondly, spend your afternoon doing exercises that retrain your brain. I have a few favorite ways of doing this and I do feel like I could create a whole video on it, but we're gonna go through it real quick. Self-compassion meditation and journaling. It will retrain your brain. Visualization exercises where you actually sink into the real feelings that you would have in that situation. You're not just creating false feelings, you're really sinking into the realness of that scenario. Journaling on your limiting beliefs, your weird reactions, any big feelings that come up. Gratitude journaling. So literally just riffing on something that you are really, really grateful for, or multiple things. Nearly all of those things can be done from the comfort of your own home within your afternoon routine. They're high impact and pretty quick exercises that you can do. Follow your interests. When you follow your curiosity, what you learn has this way of popping back up just when you need it. Even when you really thought that it would never have any practical use in your life, even if your interests just feel indulgent. The other thing I love about following your curiosity is that feeling of freedom that it gives you, especially when you work for someone else and you value freedom. Work on your goals. So I made a video recently that was all about doing a morning routine. And I talked about how I worked on my goals in my morning routine for a few years before I was able to quit my job, do YouTube full time. That was my big goal. If you are a night person, work on your goals at night. Be self-indulgent, connect, enjoy. I really don't think that we should be optimizing every single minute of our day for productivity. And a lot of the things I've talked about in this video are very productivity related. But I wanna be clear that Luke and I have spent like the last week spending our afternoons watching The Voice. That series has really just gotten better and better, although it's getting more and more disgusting. Last night, I read a book with Luke beside me. Your afternoons shouldn't just be for optimizing. It's okay to be self-indulgent. It is okay to spend your night just connecting with your partner or connecting with your friends. You should be living your life, not just working on yourself or working on your life. What I would say is just pay attention to what feels good. If you do find that you're spending four hours on TikTok at night and you're like, oh, that actually makes me feel gross, that's when you should start doing something different. But if you spend like an hour on TikTok and then you do your little bits and pieces and then you read a book, that's a good time. Follow what makes you feel good, move away from what makes you feel bad. If you liked this video, you might like my video on how to design a life-changing morning routine. A lot of the advice in that video, I would say could be applied to how to create a life-changing afternoon routine. I'm gonna have that linked on the screen as well as down below. I appreciate you so very much and I will see you soon.