7 Things I Did To Stop Wasting My Evenings After Work

Okay, so are you the type of person where after a long days of work, you plop down on the couch and scroll for hours or maybe you watch TV or do something else? Well, guess what? You just wasted your evening. You clicked on this video because you want to learn how to stop doing it. Let me show you how. I watched a lot of videos on it and I honestly think that most people are getting this wrong and so I want to show you the step-by-step process that you can use to stop wasting your evenings because the truth is if you want to get ahead of 99% of people, you need to and that might sound extreme but the time between when you get off of work to when you go to bed is a good amount of time that you can be using to get closer to whatever goal that you have. So I'm going to be showing you how to do that even when you're getting home from work being super tired. So first, what you need to do is you need to understand the problem. You're not tired, you're mentally overstimulated and decision fatigued. Maybe you're getting home from work and you were in the service business and people were being extra stupid that day. I know, like I used to work at Papa John's. One day, this guy comes in, he starts like cussing me out and mind you, I was 15. No, in actuality, I was like 16 or 17. But he starts cussing me out, he's holding the pizza and honestly guys, he's saying it was cut horribly and so I look at the pizza and honestly, it was cut like horribly but still, he's like cussing out a 16-year-old over there. People are unhinged and so I completely get it if you're super mentally overstimulated from getting home from work, working in the service business or maybe you come from a job where like let's say you're coding and so you're just really decision fatigued. You're making decisions all day and so you just feel like you just need to take a break and scroll for hours and so you're getting home from work and after work, your brain is craving dopamine, not discipline and so that's why you scroll, you snack or you watch YouTube or Netflix or TikTok for hours. So first off, ask yourself, what are your current outlets? When you get home from work, what are the things that you do? Now we know what we need to avoid. Step number two is to get clear on what your goals are and then use your evenings to get closer to those goals. Most people waste their evenings because they don't know what these hours are for. If your only goal is to relax, then your brain is just going to default to easy dopamine like scrolling and eating. But when you define your bigger goal, your evenings suddenly have direction. So for example, let's say your goal is to get good at a skill. So it could be playing the piano or guitar or it could be coding or it could be writing. Now we're going to start to spend 45 minutes a night getting better at this skill. 45 minutes a night doesn't sound like much, but over three months, that's 65 hours. 65 hours of focused work on the skill gets you ahead of 90% of people. After 65 hours of practicing a skill, you're in a completely different place than where you were at zero hours, even at five or 10 hours. And I'm going to give you a strategy to get even better at this that nobody knows. So when I was writing the script for this video, I watched a whole bunch of YouTube videos of people talking about this. And usually it goes something like, so when you get home from work, you want this exact routine. For 10 minutes, you want to do this. For 30 minutes, you want to do this. The truth is you don't need to do all of that. You just need to be making progress towards one meaningful goal. And if you are able to do that every single day, when you get home from work, you're going to have made so much progress in three months, six months, a year. So write down your main goals and pick one to focus on and then work on that goal for 45 minutes every single night. And you don't have to start at 45 minutes. You can start out working on it for five minutes. Week two, you increase it to 10 minutes. Week three, 15 minutes, until you get to 45 minutes, until you get to an hour, until you get to however long. Now you might have multiple goals. So the way to go about doing this is you only want to work towards one goal for the first four to six weeks. After four to six weeks, and it feels like more of a habit, then you can start adding on, you know, working on different, you know, goals. Once it feels automatic or easy to show up for, you can add a second one. Because this is what habits are. Habits are actions that we take that feel easier to do than not to do. For example, you might have a habit of brushing your teeth. When you wake up in the morning, it's easier for you to just go to the sink and brush your teeth versus not doing it. Because if you don't do it, like you feel gross. Another one might be drinking coffee. In the morning, it's easier for you to drink coffee versus not to drink coffee, because you feel like it's part of your identity. You feel like it's what you're supposed to do when you're just used to doing it every single morning. Another one for me is like going to the gym. And this is a habit that a lot of people want to build. For me, it's easier for me to go to the gym a couple times a week versus not doing it, because I actually just feel this urge to go to the gym. That's how you define a habit. It's part of your identity, and it's easier to do it than not to do it. And so once, you know, you working towards this project or building this skill in your evenings feels like something that's easier to do than not to do, then it doesn't really take nearly as much effort. Then you could start adding on new projects and new skills. Consistency compounds faster than intensity. You don't need a three-hour grind session. You just need 20 minutes to an hour of focused work every single evening towards your goals. Then you could spend the rest of the time and the rest of the night scrolling or doing whatever. Because to be honest, it's not bad. After working all day, you deserve to rest. You deserve to let your brain just chill out. As long as you spend a little bit of time during your evenings getting towards a goal, you will have made progress and headed in a direction in some part of your life by the end of that day. And that's how you go to bed feeling good.