I hear from many women that they have no energy after work to do “productive” things. Let’s talk about what to do about that.
A full transcript will appear here within two weeks of the episode being published.
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Full Transcript
Ep 83. For Those with No Energy at the End of the Day
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey! All right, so today we’re gonna talk about something that I hear a lot about from the women I work with and even the women I get to talk to in the various communities is this sense of I have a problem and that problem is that I have no energy after work to do productive things. And I think we’re all familiar with that feeling, whether it’s something you feel every day, during certain phases of life, occasionally, whatever it is, we all get it, and I think for a lot of us, it’s more common than we realize. We can plan to do these productive things after work, when we get home from work, or at the end of a workday whenever your workday is. And you had these plans. You’re actually really looking forward to doing them on some level, but you then get to the time when that plan rolls around, and your energy is gone. So you don’t do any of the things. You might beat yourself up for not doing those things. You might feel guilty or just upset you didn’t have the energy to do it, and you might repeat that cycle again tomorrow.
Embrace Reality – 1:28
And what I want to talk about today is the fix of this approach. The fix, in all reality, is not how do I magically give you more energy in those evenings. Instead, the fix is more along the lines of something that you’ve heard me say a lot of times, which is embrace the reality of it. And the reality is you have limited energy. And by the time your evening rolls around after work, your brain has likely spent all day making decisions. I mean, we’re talking, let’s say, 6:00 PM at night — let’s say probably around 6:00 AM you woke up, so 12 hours of decisions bringing intellectual A-game, managing 10,000 logistics, and more. It is understandably tired. That is not a problem. That is just the reality. I mean, you can look at it as a problem if you want, but at the end of the day, it’s just a neutral fact. Your brain is tired. It has limited energy, and its energy is spent on very understandable things. And I am a huge proponent of — I just believe so much that if we embrace reality, even if it’s frustrating, but really embrace it, absorb it, just accept it, it’s also very empowering and will help us enjoy our lives more.
I want to talk about this more today, like what does this mean from a practical standpoint. What does it look like to embrace this reality and, hey, there’s still stuff that does need to get done, so when do we do that. [Laughs] So let’s talk about that today!
#1: Get Clear on Your Necessities – 3:02
The first thing is that I think it is very critical and empowering and clarifying to get clear — which obviously I just said clarifying — so get clear on figuring out what are your necessities. What are the real necessities on the evening? In your evenings, when you finish up your workday, what do you really have to do? That could look different for everybody, but it’s probably something along the lines of eating and making dinner, a simple dinner; cleaning up a kitchen but maybe not the rest of the house; showering, if you bathe at night; walking and feeding a dog; if you have kids, making sure they’ve gotten home, done their homework, bathed at a cadence that you decide; maybe empty school bags if you do that in the evenings and packed up tomorrow’s lunches or bags, things like that; run the dishwasher, whatever it might be. Everybody can have different necessities, but I think getting very clear about what yours are can give you a lot of clarity on where you direct your attention and time to when you have such limited energy.
#2: Only Do The Necessities for Three Months – 4:08
The second point of this, after figuring out your necessities, is trying for three months to do this. Only do the necessities. You are not allowed to do anything else. You are not allowed to make plans to do anything else that is “productive.” Just to be clear, if you want to do something fun or exciting, go for it, but you’re not allowed to plan to do anything “productive” beyond those necessities for three months. Just try it. See what it feels like. Just to be clear, that means no house projects, no financial goal setting or budgeting meetings, maybe no personal email if that’s not a necessity of yours, none of those bigger “productive” things.
The reason I say this is that I think if you take all of those necessities and plot them out visually in your calendar in the way that I encourage you to do and plot out your sleep hours, which I encourage you to do, and maybe your wind down hour or half hour or whatever it is, as I like people to do, I think you’ll start seeing that there’s a lot less time for anything else in the first place. And that, again, while frustrating, is incredibly persuasive to see. If you can see it all visually and you’re like, “Oh, well, this makes a lot more sense that I wasn’t getting to anything else from a time standpoint, and then add in my limited energy standpoint, and it’s no wonder I’m not getting this stuff done.”
Okay? So, first, I want you to figure out what your necessities are, and then I want you, for three months, to try to not do anything else other than those necessities. And I want you to see how that feels. My guess is life will still feel pretty full, but you are letting yourself off the unrealistic hook you had put yourself on to do a lot of productive things in the evenings when you didn’t have, really, time and definitely not energy to do it.
#3: When To Do The Other Stuff – 6:04
The third component of this, though, is well, when do you do that other stuff because you still need to. And the first thing I want to just nudge you to do is evaluate the other stuff. Do you really need to do it? Do you need to do it at the frequency you think you need to do it? Do you need to do it in the timeline you think you need to do it? Does that thing need to require that much time each week to do it? There are a lot of things we can analyze here, but it’s just really important to, first, before you start trying to cram it all in, evaluate what is the stuff? Does it need to happen this frequently? What does it look like? Could it happen less frequently, take less time? Could I punt it out? Could I not do this for six months and then do it? There are a lot of things we can play with there.
The hard part is, I think that sometimes we just want it all done now. But I want you to remember that you will never get to a place where all the things are done. And I get the temptation, believe me. I get wanting to have nothing on the to-do list and hanging over our heads, but it’s just not reality. And so, instead of kind of torturing ourselves by holding us to this get-it-done-now mentality and trying to cram it all in, and instead allowing and accepting that this is gonna take longer than we might ideally want but also we can plan it all out in a more realistic way that we can actually accomplish and play out, that will actually allow us to get more done even if it takes more time than we want. So again, evaluate what the things are that you’re trying to do.
#4: Plan For When To Do Them – 7:32
Next, I want you to plan for when to do them. I want you to think about on a Sunday morning, if you have kids, while your partner or sitter takes the kids or a family member or a friend date or whatever it is, think about using that time, if you want. I also know some people really like taking a workday or a work morning or even a couple mornings off. If you don’t have to take a full PTO time to do that, go for it. But if you wanted to do a Thursday morning personal power hour or power morning to bang out a lot of this type of stuff, that could be an option for you.
What I think is important to realize is some of this stuff is a real project and trying to squeeze it into nooks and crannies over time hasn’t worked and it probably won’t work, and so, treating it as the project it is and protecting real time to do it will help you actually get to do it and do it in a way that actually accounts for how much work and energy and focus it will take. And all of this really is an experiment. And so, that’s why I just throw this out there. Try this for three months and see how it goes. Really let yourself off the hook for doing that “productive” stuff during the week. Just come home. Do the necessities. And then get ready for bed and sleep and get that solid sleep.
And I just throw this out there that solid sleep will do you far more good than 30 minutes of painfully unmotivated work. And so, just embrace that. Again, embrace the reality, get the sleep, read that fun book, do whatever your energy wants you to do, and see how that feels over the course of three months.
In addition, see how it feels to protect time in a real way, whether it’s on the weekend and getting some extra or coordinated childcare help if you have kids or taking some time during the work week to do some of this personal stuff, maybe when you have childcare lined up already, and just taking some of that PTO if you need to. Really treating it as these are things that require time when I have energy. I do not have energy in the evenings. I do have energy on a Thursday morning or on the weekend morning, and so, how am I going to be able to capture that energy for these tasks in a way that I want to, instead of trying to bang my head against a wall in the evenings when I know I don’t have energy then.
I truly believe that the more we can embrace the reality of what our energy is doing and just work with it and not against it and get creative to still get where we need to go will really, really benefit us and help us enjoy our lives more in the ways that we want.
Miscellaneous Note: Transition Out of Work Mode – 10:07
Now, I do want to end on one last very miscellaneous note that really has nothing to do with the above. But what I want to share is that I think there are ways that we can give ourselves a little bit more life at the end of the day, and just to be clear, I don’t mean for you to use this extra energy burst for productive things, but I do want you to use it to actually enjoy your evenings at home with friends and family because it’s not like maybe the energy level you would need to do “productive” things, but it might be the energy you need to actually enjoy your family and people you love and things like that.
And so, I just want to throw out there that one thing I really like to do is, at the end of a workday, as I transition — for me this often is on my end-of-day dog walk, but if you have a drive home or a commute home or even just you want to do this as you maybe putter around the house as you transition from work mode into more personal life mode, have something that signals to your brain that you do that. Now, for me, that something is as basic as just listening to a fun audiobook or a fun podcast. I tend to, in the mornings, really focus on listening to more business, career-type podcasts that keep me in the right frame of mind when it comes to work, and so, when I listen to more fun things, that is kind of signaling to my brain, “The workday’s over, and now we’re moving into that more fun zone.” It doesn’t give me, as I said, a massive burst of energy that lets me go organize our garage, but it does give me a bit of that, “Ooh, fun,” we’re-switching-gears-type energy that allows me to enjoy my kids when I pick them up and get to hang out with them a bit and also entertain me when they’re doing something that they’re playing in another room, and I get to listen to something fun myself. It’s a level of energy or enjoyment of the situation, and I just wanted to throw it out here because it’s something I intentionally do to help kind of signal to my brain we’re leaving work and also that it’s time to enjoy this other part of my life.
For you, that could be something even more formal like, I don’t know, lighting a candle or having a cup of tea, or it can just be something like I’m talking about where you call a friend or a family member or listen to something that’s fun and really just kind of signal again to your brain that it’s time to move into a more enjoyable frame of mind. So a little bit random at the end but hope that helps as well!
The most important part of what I want you to hear is this: accept reality. Accept the reality of who you are. Accept the reality that you have limited energy, and just own it. Own it, allow it, and use creativity to still get where you want to go. Again, that might sound like and look like things that you maybe have ruled out in the past or think it won’t work for you. But the beautiful part of this is it’s an experiment, so just try it out for a couple of months. Try a different approach and see how it works for you and let me know how it goes!
All right, thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
