How To Be Productive After Work

8 hours of work.

8 hours of sleep.

8 hours of 'leisure time'.

This is what each of our days are said to consist of.

So why does it feel like our life revolves around work?

Why do we not have anything to show for those 8 hours?

Why do we sit at home, night after night, knowing we want to spend our lives more meaningfully and do productive things with our time, but just... not?

Over the past 12 months, as I've been building a business alongside work, uni and all the other parts of my life, I've been forced to confront this.

In this newsletter, I'm going to give you the 6 solutions that I've used to stop wasting my evenings and start using them to pursue my goals.

Whether you want to build a business, work out consistently, pursue a new hobby, or simply use your time more intentionally, I hope this helps!

1. Make your life easy

Before we even get into anything about motivation, energy or productivity, we have to talk about time.

One big reason we find it so hard to do anything meaningful with our time in the evening, is something I call the maintenance bucket.

Every task in our life falls into one of three buckets.

Growth: tasks we do for our future selves, that make us more skilled, more knowledgeable or a better person.

Taking a course
Working out
Building a business
Learning a language

Freedom: tasks we do because we enjoy them

Seeing friends
Watching a movie
Travelling
Reading

Then, we have the maintenance bucket: tasks we do to keep our lives operating as they currently are.

Cooking
Cleaning
Doing the washing
Calling our loved ones

You would be incredibly surprised how much time this maintenance bucket takes up.

Last month, David, a client I’m currently working with in my Peak Performance Program, started time blocking for that first time.

The first week he did it, he blocked 30 minutes for his dinner. It took 50.

He thought walking from the gym to work took 10 minutes. It was actually 20.

Simply keeping our lives in order takes so much time.

This is why it feels like there’s never enough time to do anything meaningful after work.

But, there’s ways to cut down on this.

Here are a few of my favourites:

1. Organise Routinely

Obviously we can’t cut out the washing, life admin or task management all together.

But, if you can create a consistent routine for keeping your life organised, managing these maintenance tasks will be much easier.

A weekly washing and cleaning schedule will keep your home maintenance tasks more efficient.

A daily and weekly planning schedule will keep your time management more efficient.

Storing all your tasks, projects and references in a reliable place will make your information management more efficient (the Notion Digital Home Base can help with this).

If you treat every task like it’s a stand-alone thing, it will inevitably take up much more time and feel much more overwhelming.

Making it part of a bigger system will keep you on track and make managing your maintenance bucket significantly easier.

2. Meal prep

Dinner genuinely does take up much more time than you think.

Seriously, the next time you cook, time how long it takes you to

Decide what to eat
Get the groceries
Prepare the meal
Eat the meal
Wash the dishes
Put the dishes away

If cooking is part of your freedom or growth buckets, this isn’t a problem.

But if it’s part of your maintenance bucket, it’s costing you a lot.

Meal prepping once per week is an easy, efficient way to free up time in your evenings.

The fact that my dinner takes me 3-5 minutes to heat up or prepare means I can spend that extra time on my priorities, and make the most of my evenings.

Some of my favourite dinners to meal prep are:

Curries
Salmon, rice and veggies
Bolognese with potatoes or pasta
Simple salads that don’t go soggy

3. Plan in advance

I have wasted way too many nights scrolling just to procrastinate.

To delay making a decision about what I actually want to do.

This is what left me failing to do anything meaningful, even when I did have the time.

What I now do, is identify my top priorities for each evening before that evening starts.

As I plan my week, I’ll time block in a key activities for each night, so I don’t need to procrastinate.

The more specific you can be with these the better.

2. Don’t Go Home

How many times have you finished work, told yourself you would go home, grab your gym bag, and go to the gym…

Only to get home and do… the complete opposite?

How about planning to work on your business or make progress on that course.

Only to spend all night on the couch watching Netflix?

Full transparency: I’m basically describing my own life 2 years ago.

One single change completely broke this cycle.

I stopped going home at night.

I packed my gym bag and went straight to do my workout.

I packed my personal laptop, my pre-prepped dinner, and drove to a library.

I forced myself to change my routine.

And changing my routine changed my behaviour.

As humans, we are so habitual.

Our brains are constantly attempting to form associations between emotions, actions, contexts and locations.

Anything that can reduce the effort that it has to put it the next time it encounters the situation.

If your brain associates arriving home with scrolling for 60 minutes.

It’s pretty hard to convince it to do another activity that requires more effort.

Avoiding the trip home will remove this all together.

Your brain will start to associate finishing work, with taking a different action.

Whether that’s:

Working for 90 minutes
Doing a workout session
Reading at the park
Or going for a walk

But, what if you work from home?

Replace ‘don’t go home’ with ‘leave home immediately’, or ‘go to that dedicated zone’.

If you’ve been working inside for 8 hours, you are going to be tired and drained.

You will want to sit on the couch and do nothing.

So make it easy to do the opposite.

Make it as though you’re truly finishing your day and leaving the office.

Plan on going to the gym? Pack your bag in the morning and put it at the front door, or in your car.

Want to work on your business? Find a local library or workspace and make that your go-to.

We will always default to the easy option.

Even when it doesn’t serve us long term.

The harder you can make it to do what you don’t want to do.

And the easier you can make it to do what does serve you.

The more disciplined you will be.

3. Care About Your Work

I have an issue with the ‘quiet quitting’ movement.

But it’s not for the reason you might think.

What is the quiet quitting movement?

Workers are feeling burnt out, undervalued and underpaid.

They feel employers are demanding way too much, and not giving enough back in return for their efforts.

So employees are taking action.

Doing the bare minimum at work.

Enough to keep their job.

But putting in no more time, energy or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary.

Whether you’re quiet quitting or not, I think everyone has found themselves clock watching at some point.

Staring at the minutes, while they pass painfully slowly.

Being at work physically, but completely tapped out mentally.

Here is the issue.

All of these things

Quiet quitting
Clock watching
Having no personal investment in your work

They completely drain your energy.

When you sit at your desk hating your job, despising your boss, waiting for the time to pass.

You are spending 8+ hours, a third of your day in a state of negativity.

Every minute of boredom or distraction makes your work that much more soul-sucking.

You can’t just switch that off the minute you stop working.

This negativity seeps into the rest of your life.

You finish the day so drained, that you genuinely don’t have the energy to be productive after work.

Being fully engaged, caring about and putting effort into the work that you do is what leaves you energised.

Feeling like your work and your time mattered and created value.

Hopefully, your job has some element that you can find this value in.

Some task or activity that gets you into a flow state.

But if it doesn’t, get creative.

When I worked at Bakers Delight, I set myself a challenge to upsell as many extra hot cross buns as possible.

When I worked at an optometrist, I started each day with the goal of helping just one person find a pair of glasses that they loved.

You can be fully engaged in your work, or you can spend the day watching the minutes tick by.

You will be spending the same amount of time at work either way.

And I can guarantee you, choosing to make that time count will do insane things for not just your career, but your personal life too.

4. Treat Your Evenings As A New ‘Day’

This solution is inspired by Ed Mylett.

An entrepreneur, #1 global speaker and best selling author.

He has achieved massive success across almost every industry and aspect of life, and he puts this down to one thing.

Unlike most people, his weeks don’t have 7 days, they have 21 days.

How?

His days are 6 hours long.

Day 1: 6am to midday
Day 2: midday to 6pm
Day 3: 6pm to midnight

In day 1, he aims to get a full day’s worth of work done.

Day 2 he pursues a full day’s worth of fun memories, meetings, and phone calls. It’s a day for relationships, connection, and getting stuff done.

Day 3 has similar themes of work, relationships, and success.

Here’s why this works so well.

We forget how much time we have.

We finish work and think, wow, that was a big day.

We justify an evening binging Netflix because we see the day as being ‘finished’.

Forgetting that it’s currently 6pm and there’s still 3-4 hours that we can use to get things done.

The point here isn’t to fill every waking hour with work or productivity.

In fact, I really don’t recommend you follow Ed’s schedule because

95% of us need more than 6 hours of sleep
You probably don’t have as much control over your time as him
This would not be sustainable for most people - he has worked his way up to this point - you are probably starting from 0

The point, is to shift your mindset around time.

To stop seeing your evenings as ‘filler’ time, but see them as an entirely new opportunity to do something with your life.

If 6pm-10pm was an entire day, what would you want to spend that day doing?

What would make you see that day as ‘successful’?

Sometimes, this might be watching Netflix, just like some Sundays are dedicated to purely relaxing.

But if you go into your Sunday planning to get your life together, go on a day trip, work on your business or hang out with friends… you’re much less likely to resort to wasting that day binging Netflix.

You can do a lot more in 3-4 hours than you think.

Start treating it as a separate part of your day, and you’ll find out just how productively you can use your time after work.

5. Work In The Morning

Despite what social media tells you, it’s actually pretty normal to want to get home and crash at night.

In your head, you’re doing 8 or 9 hours of work each day.

But in reality, you’re also commuting 1-2 hours.

You’re sitting through small talk, or making big decisions.

You’re dealing with the overhead associated with your work - adding stress, information overload and communication obligations to your plate.

It is not an easy task to reach the end of the day and still push ahead with your goals.

Especially if they require your brain.

No one is forcing your to work towards your goals.

It comes entirely through self-motivated willpower - it requires proactivity.

Working at your job, on the other hand, has an element of job-related willpower - it is more reactive.

You’re motivated by the drive to maintain your foundational needs - keeping a roof over your head.

This means you’re much more likely to keep working at your job, even when you don’t feel like it, than you are to keep working at 8pm, sitting at home, when Netflix is just a click away.

Working in the morning, when my willpower and motivation is at it’s highest.

When I’m focused, energised and productive.

Before the day can throw me off track.

Is the one change that has single handedly changed my life.

This is why so many successful people wake up early.

Not because waking up at 5am makes you successful.

But because having a structured morning routine, and a period of time dedicated to your goals before the rest of the world is awake allows you to do the things that create success.

An hour in the morning is worth 3 hours in the evening.

And I know, waking up early feels so hard.

But a big part of that comes down to your body clock normalising going to bed and waking up later.

Gradually shifting will go a long way in changing your perspective around mornings.

Whether it’s working, working out, or another pursuit.

Once you feel the difference, you’ll wonder why you ever tried doing things another way.

6. Look After Yourself

You literally will not have the energy, motivation or discipline to be productive after work if you’re not looking after yourself and respecting your body and brain.

Exercise each day
Learn how to eat healthy
Prioritise 7-9 hours of sleep
Drink more water, and limit your alcohol
Limit your screen time and take care of your mental health
Take regular breaks and avoid staying glued to your desk all day

This isn’t something I can convince you on.

It’s something you have to trust me on, and experience for yourself.

It won’t be obvious just how far below your peak potential you are operating, until you start looking after yourself properly.

If you do nothing on the list above, you won’t drop dead tomorrow.

But your performance will suffer.

And performing 20% below your max, day after day, has massive impacts on your productivity, mood and motivation.

Pursuing meaningful goals or activities at the end of your day will be so much easier when you are healthy, happy, well rested and energised.

This YouTube video on How I Never Run Out Of Energy will help get you started

Action Steps

Ready to put this into action?

Here's your action steps for this week:

1. Make Your Life Easy

Implement one habit that makes managing your maintenance bucket easier.

It could be:

Meal prepping
Planning your week
Creating a washing and cleaning routine

2. Experiment with staying away from home

One night this week

Do your workout
Work on your business
Do a fun activity or hobby

Without returning home in between.

See how this impacts your motivation and productivity, and consider continuing with it longer-term!

3. Care about your work

Find one aspect of your work that feels meaningful to you (or create one).

Focus on that as you go about your day, to generate energy that carries through to your night.

4. Change your perspective around evenings

Instead of seeing them as the end of your day, start seeing them as the start of a new day, with new opportunities!

5. Consider working in the mornings

If you really can't find the energy or motivation to do anything meaningful after work, try doing something before.

If you try this and find it works, slowly start shifting your sleep and wake times earlier to create more time for these activities.

6. Look after yourself

There's probably one area of your physical or mental health that you know needs work right now.

Identify this area, and start taking action to improve it!

See you next week!

Tayla

Looking for more resources?

You'll find all my Notion templates, courses and other free resources here.

Want to become a peak performer?

If you're an ambitious and driven individual, find out more and inquire about a free discovery call here, so you can excel in your career, without sacrificing your personal ambitions or wellbeing.

This is productivity & performance coaching from someone who has done years of research and experimentation, developing a series of simple, evidence-backed habits, routines and systems that unlock the path to taking back control over your time, energy, focus and mind, and reaching your full potential.

Are you a creator, solopreneur or small business looking to upgrade your digital organisation?

After harnessing Notion to run my entire life and business, I'm here to help you do it too.

Inquire about a free discovery call here to explore how you can streamline your processes to save time, money and mental energy with simple Notion systems.

More ways to connect