122. Stop Wasting Your Evenings: 5 Ideas That Work

Your evenings don't have to disappear into your phone or the couch. Try these 5 simple ideas busy working moms can use to actually enjoy their evenings again, starting tonight.

In this episode, I'm sharing 5 simple ideas you can use so you actually enjoy your evening, instead of just trudging through it.

✨ Why your "first move" the second you walk in the door decides your whole evening, and how to change it 

✅ The difference between rest that drains you and rest that actually gives you energy back 

⏱️ A simple wind-down rule to help you stop scrolling and actually fall asleep 

🌿 How batching your household admin on Friday frees up your weeknights 

💛 Why picking one thing per evening beats trying to do it all

One shift is all it takes to get your evening back. Follow the podcast so you don't miss weekly organizing tips for Beautiful Living!

👉👉Ready to declutter or organize? Schedule your Free Consultation Call at https://fireflybridge.com/consultation

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Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

I'll never forget this.I was driving home one day, it was probably 5:15 or so, it was winter, so the sun was already almost gone. It was one of those really gray days that makes everything feel gloomy. My kids were already at home with the sitter, and I was two minutes from my house, already picturing the rest of my night. Homework, driving to ballet class, dinner, putting away the laundry, and then, if I was lucky, just enough energy left to scroll my phone and watch something until I fell asleep. And I was tired just thinking about it. I hadn't even walked in the door yet.

So I pulled into the driveway, and I sat there for a second, and I knew I didn't have it in me to walk in and be happy mom. So instead of opening the garage and going in that way, I parked in the driveway, and I snuck around to the front door, and tiptoed upstairs with my coat and boots still on. And with all my bags. I locked my bedroom door, put my headphones on with some soft music, laid down on the bed, and closed my eyes. I stayed like that for about twenty minutes.

Then I got up, changed into sweatpants, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and went downstairs to start my evening.

My daughter and the sitter saw me coming down from upstairs instead of through the garage, and they were a little surprised. The sitter said "Were you hiding?" And I said, "Yep, sure was." And we had a good laugh about it.

That night at bedtime, my daughter asked me, "Mommy, why were you hiding?" I told her I wasn't really hiding, I was just taking a little rest. And she was fine with that. But I was thinking, I mean, it's a little odd, right? Why did I need to hide?

But the more I've thought about that evening, the more I think it was one of the smartest things I did that week. It's the reason that I had anything left in me to read them books, to be the slightest bit present with them once I came downstairs.

But it worked. And I know I'm not the only mom who's ever done her own version of that. I've got friends who've told me the same thing, that by the time the kids were fed and the house is handled and the homework's done, they're so wiped out that, like, the whole evening just feels like it's disappeared, or they don't know how many episodes of a show exactly they've watched, and they don't even feel rested the next morning.

So today, I want to give you five ideas that can help with that. Five ideas that can help you feel like you got your evening back.

Welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living. I'm Zee Siman, The Choosy Organizer.

This podcast is for women who are done organizing everything and ready to be choosy about what matters, what's enough, and what can wait.

This is episode 122. When we're busy, It's easy to feel like our days are made up of 2 parts: the work day, and getting ready for the work day.

Most of us have maybe three or four hours between walking in the door after work and finally going to sleep. It's not a ton of time, but it's not nothing, right? And yet it can feel like most of it disappears and we're not enjoying our evening on a consistent basis.

And this isn't about adding a bunch of new tasks to your evening. You already have enough on your plate. But I'm going to give you five ideas that can change how you feel about the whole evening. You can choose which of these to try. 

The first is to Change your first move. 
That's what I did that day that I hid in my room. And I did it without realizing it.

Think about what you typically do as soon as you get home after a long day. Like, think of it in detail. Do you put your stuff down and go through the mail? Or do you immediately start prepping dinner? Or do you sit on the couch and open your phone and scroll for a while? Or are you immediately driving a child to practice, or picking up a child from someplace?

Whatever it is, that's just habit repeating itself, the same first move, night after night.

A Duke University psychologist named Wendy Wood, who studies habits, says that "Although people like to think they are in control of what they do, almost half of human behavior takes place in the same location pretty much every day and comes to be cued by that environment."

Meaning that we think we're making decisions all the time. But we don't realize that what we do is often a result of our environment. Where we are, the smells, sights or sounds around us. We think we intended to do what we end up doing, like I meant to go through the mail right now. But the cue to do that may have just been the fact that you're standing at the front door where the mail is.

So if you've been meaning to read more, but you're caught in this loop of I have to go through the mail, then I need to drive this kid to practice, then I need to make dinner, so there's just no time to read, well change where you go first.

If you know that coming home stops your motivation and your momentum, don't come straight home after work. Stop at the library or a coffee shop and read that book before you head home.

Or sit in the car or on a bench away from the other parents at practice for 30 minutes and get in a few more pages before you go sit with them.

When you get home, sit in the car for 10 minutes before you go in, or sneak to your room, or take the dog around the block and listen to your audio book before you walk into the kitchen and get into chore mode.

So your first move doesn't have to be the same every single day. The point is you're picking a different environment to be in before you fall into autopilot every evening. 

The second idea is to Do something that actually gives you energy back.
Not everything that feels like rest actually rests you. Scrolling feels like rest because it takes no effort, but it often leaves you feeling just as worn out as when you started, yeah? Some things take a little effort up front, and you get energy back afterward.

For me, that twenty minutes with headphones and soft music did that. I wasn't asleep. But I got up from it feeling lighter. For one of my friends, it's a five-minute walk around the block before she even opens the front door. Another friend takes a cup of coffee in total silence and she leaves her phone in another room.

So just think back to the last time you felt more like yourself at the end of the evening than you did like at the beginning. 

What were you doing? That's your clue. It's probably not bingeing a show until midnight. It's usually something smaller, a short walk, music, a few minutes with your eyes closed, a real conversation with your partner, a weeknight dinner out with a friend, working on a hobby you love, going to a talk that interests you. It's doing something that truly fulfills you, not just checks a box of things I must do.

And don't turn this into one more thing you have to get right. Find something that works for you on an ordinary Tuesday.

My husband realized that working out made him feel better, but not first thing in the morning. So now he prefers to work out after work, even if it cuts into family time. 

I think that might be a big part of why we aren't doing more of the things that bring us rest in the evenings, because we feel guilty about spending that time by ourselves.

But it's also important to think of this rest as refueling your energy, not just "I have to rest before tomorrow, so I'm going to watch a couple of shows." Streaming platforms a lot of the time autoplay the next episode. Your tiktok feed never ends, right? Those passive actions that feel like rest are programmed to suck you in, and they're not replenishing your energy. These things numb you.

So if working out in the evening is not restful or re-energizing to you, don't do that. Put an hour into a hobby instead, or take your kids for a bike ride, or go chat with your neighbor about what's happening in the neighborhood.

Your evenings matter because they're limited. You can't just rely on "Well later, in the future, when I have more time" to do the things you've been meaning to. 
The third idea is to Protect a real wind-down before bed.
This is really hard for me, and I'm trying to get better at it. I'm so guilty of pulling my phone out before bedtime.

You know the pattern. You tell yourself you'll watch one more episode or scroll for five minutes, and then it's 2 hours later and you still have to get up at the same time in the morning. And screens stimulate the brain, so you're not the least bit drowsy afterwards, though you  you’re probably tired.

The recommendation is to give yourself twenty minutes of something that isn't a screen right before bed. That's your off-ramp. Read a few pages of a paper book, do a full proper skincare routine, lay out tomorrow's clothes, all of that will work.

It becomes a real ending to the day, something with an actual start and stop. And again, it's the environmental cues. If you do this consistently, your body will adapt and realize that this thing that you do signals bedtime.

The Fourth idea is to Batch your household and admin stuff so they don't take over your evenings.

You know how much time you're spending on driving kids around, making dinner, picking out what to wear the next day, scheduling, grocery shopping, all of that every evening. And your evenings are not as long as your days.

So batch the things you can on one day, or on Friday afternoon, and you'll reclaim more of your evenings, right? So create your meal plan on Friday afternoon, and place your grocery order right then, or stop by the store on your way home on Friday. 

Then prep as much as you can for the week over the weekend. Plan out what you'll be wearing for the whole week. Do the same for the kids.During that same Friday afternoon planning time, you're managing your calendar for the whole next week.

These things are going to free up time on weeknights, instead of you falling into making choice after choice after choice each evening.

Research shows that by evening, our cognitive abilities are way lower than they are in the morning. Makes sense, right? We make better decisions in the morning than we do later in the day. So our decisions are slower and probably harder to make after a full day. 

So don't wait until the end of the day to decide what's for dinner. Or who should drive the kids to practice tonight. Or do you need to do a load of laundry?

If you batch make most of these decisions on Friday, then you won't need to make as many of these decisions on Wednesday at 7 o’clock at night, leaving you more cognitive space to do things you want.

And the fifth idea is to Choose one single thing you want to do per evening. 
You're a high achiever, I know this. And you want to be productive, and you you have the expectation that you'll cook dinner, work out, get the laundry done, help the kids with homework, go watch your son's tennis practice, call your mom and your best friend, sit down for a real conversation with your partner over dinner, finish some work for tomorrow, make the vet appointment, research the plans for the trip you're taking next month, and still get a full 8 hours of sleep.

And when you don't accomplish all those things tonight, and instead you fall on the couch and you've been scrolling Instagram for the past 47 minutes, you feel guilty and unproductive. And then you associate your evening with being inadequate, with disappointment in yourself for wasting your time instead of being focused on getting that whole list of things done.

But we want evenings to feel fulfilling, right? So instead of the 18 things that you must accomplish tonight, think about what you want to accomplish this week. Then parse that down to one thing you can work on each evening.

You might work out 3 nights a week, and go have dinner out with your partner one night, call your mom another night, read a big chunk of that one book one night, and do one load of laundry one night.

And each week can be different, right? Maybe you go out to dinner twice a month, you work on your painting hobby 3 nights a week, you meet with your book club once a month, and you take the carpool for each child's practice once a week, and you rely on the other moms to drive them the rest of the days.

That's how you avoid feeling like, well, you can never get anything done, like you're not keeping up with everyone else, like you're always tired, always behind. If you start looking at getting things done per week, rather than per evening, you might see some patterns.

You might realize that you're enjoying cooking, so you want to learn to cook more involved dinners twice a week.

Or that you want to move a certain project forward next month, so you'll add 30 minutes of work after dinner 3 nights a week for the next month.

Looking at your weeks rather than trying to do everything every evening allows you to feel accomplished each night instead of just burning out and getting very little sleep because you've got so much to do.

Your evenings don't need a total overhaul, and they definitely don't need one more thing on your to-do list. What they need is a quick rethinking of what you want your evenings to feel like. My bet is you want to feel like you've enjoyed your evenings, instead of just managed through them.

So try one or some of these 5 ideas:

Change your first move so you're not walking straight into autopilot the second you walk through the door, and find the one thing that actually gives you energy back instead of the thing that just numbs you out. Batch your household decisions on a Friday, so Wednesday at 7 o’clock isn't the moment you're figuring out dinner and carpool and laundry all at once, and protect twenty real minutes before bed that have nothing to do with a screen. 

And under all of that, pick out the one thing you actually want out of each evening, instead of trying to fit everything into every single night.

This is Choosy Organizer stuff, right? You don't need every evening to run perfectly. You need to be choosy about which one or two of these actually move the needle forward for you this week.

You don't have to hide in your room with your boots on to get your evening back. Although, no judgment if you do. Sometimes that's exactly what it takes.

So if you're enjoying the podcast, I would really appreciate it if you'd hit follow, so you don't miss next week's episode. And if you've got thirty seconds, leaving a review really does help other women just like you find the show. It would really mean a lot.

Have a beautifully organized week. I'm Zee, and I'll see you on the next episode.