Do you get home at the end of the day, put the kids to bed (which can feel like a long chore sometimes too), and then flop down on the couch with a glass of wine, and then suddenly you realise you’ve been scrolling the explore feed on Instagram for an hour? In this episode I want to talk about how we can unlock the free time we have in our evenings so we can live with more intention and feel energised and fulfilled by the end of the week.

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If you are someone who is just exhausted by the end of the day and the thought of doing more activities seems too much, I want to talk about how we can flip this script and start choosing more fulfilling activities during your evenings and counterintuitively feel more energised than if you were just doing nothing during this time.

Over the new year period, my husband Evan and I sat down to talk about our goals and whether we wanted to make any changes to our lifestyle in 2025. Last year we had a newborn baby, and a wedding to plan, and so our evenings consisted of communicating with wedding suppliers and breastfeeding. So this year we decided to be more intentional with what we want to do in our evenings so that we can do some of the activities that are really important to us, and spend quality time together.

168 Hours in a Week

We have 168 hours in a week – it doesn’t feel like that does it! If we take let’s say 7 hours per night out for sleeping, that leaves 119 waking hours to be doing what we choose to do. There is a book by Laura Vanderkam called 168 Hours, and it’s a really interesting read, it’s a lot about intentionality with your time, and really looking closely at what you’re doing with your time without just wishing that you have more time. If you want to check it out I’d recommend it, and I have an Amazon Affiliate link for it that you can use here.

So you have 119 waking hours per week – A huge part of that will be work and looking after the kids, and necessary self care like showering and eating and brushing your teeth. But what are you doing with the rest of your time? When we start to reconstruct our week from the ground up like this, it really does feel like you have more time than you thought you did. Evenings really are the key time in the day when you could potentially be doing something that is more meaningful to you, and I want to go through how we might set that up.

In my week, Evan and I put the kids to bed between 7 and 8, and then we kinda tidy and chat and finish dishes between 8 and 8:30, and then we have time to ourselves to do whatever we want. If we go to bed at 10:30 (and sometimes it’s later), then that’s two hours every night for 7 nights per week that we have “free”; it’s time that isn’t filled with kids or work or chores.

And I want you to think about what you’re doing with that 14 hours per week?

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What Are You Currently Doing In Your Evenings?

Maybe your week isn’t exactly like mine and that’s ok, but intentionally looking at your evenings is going to have you looking at your time a little differently.

If you do have kids, you might take longer to put the kids to bed than I do, or maybe they stay up later, that’s ok, is there a way you can alter this at all? Evan and I tell the kids on Monday nights that we are going to be done with the bedtime routine by 7:45 instead of 8pm, so that we can do movie night, and I tell you movies these days are like 2 and a half hours long so we have to start them early! This means that we do fewer stories at bedtime on Mondays, and the kids spend slightly longer in the rooms before they fall asleep.

Maybe you could change the way you do bedtime, or the kids could still stay up but you tell them that on certain nights you are unavailable and are doing something else maybe in a different room. This of course depends on the ages of your kids. Sometimes you’re just in a difficult bedtime season and that’s ok, this might be something to focus on in the future. Or maybe you have a partner that can do solo bedtime a few nights a week so you can have some personal time. There are several nights where I’m still trying to get my 8 year old into bed at 8:25, so it doesn’t always go perfectly and this 8-8:30 period for me is a bit of leeway, so that’s ok.

Maybe you’ve been using this evening time to catch up on chores. If this doesn’t light you up, is there a way that you can recruit the kids to help you with chores after school or on weekends? After the kids get back from school, we do one afternoon chore (which is usually washing) where the kids and I fold up clothes and put them away. This is a short enough chore for my 8 and 11 year olds to tolerate, and it means I don’t have to do much washing during my workday or during my evenings. We also try to do most chores on weekends as a family.

Maybe in the evenings you are just feeling exhausted and all you want to do is sit on the couch with that glass of wine (for me it’s a baileys or a cold milo) and just relax, do nothing, or scroll on your phone or watch TV. This seems fair because you’ve worked hard all day, and putting the kids to bed might have been more difficult that day, and now you need a rest. But if you’re feeling like that every night, it might actually be contributing to the problem of low energy or low motivation because you’re not doing something that is fulfilling.

The Energy Problem

So I want to focus on this topic of energy now because it’s a really important one.

A lot of the time, when you have had a long day, you do want to crash on the couch at night. But I want you to ask yourself, are you actually tired, or are you in a bad mood from the day and you just want to escape with scrolling on your phone?

There are some things you can do here. We get into the habit of passive activities like scrolling on your phone and watching TV, and we do this because we feel a bit rubbish and we don’t really have to think about anything, we just get lost in screens. But when we do this, we don’t actually feel any better, we’re just avoiding our feelings and not actually filling our cup.

If we do activities that recharge us, activities that we genuinely find rewarding and enjoyable, then we actually do feel better. And usually, they don’t actually take a lot of energy per se, they just require you to make a different decision, which feels hard to your brain. Reading a book, or writing, or doing a puzzle, or calling a friend, or making a photobook of family photos, doesn’t really take heaps more energy than watching TV, and afterwards you’ll feel so much better.

The way to implement this is to plan your activity for the evening in advance, so you don’t have to make the decision to do it when you are already in your pjs on the couch with a glass of wine. Decision fatigue is real, and your brain will trick you into thinking that picking up a book instead of your phone is harder when it’s 9pm. Choosing something different will feel difficult in the moment, but if you’re already mentally prepared for it in advance, then the decision is already made and you won’t have to think about it at all.

Now, if you actually are tired, then use two or three nights per week to go to bed early! This will leave you feeling more refreshed for doing meaningful activities on other evenings of the week. This will feel so much more rewarding than being up late watching too many cat videos and making yourself even more tired for the next day.

Break Up Your Days

So I’m not suggesting that you jam pack your evenings with lots of high-energy activities, take an early night when you need it, and think about what else has been happening that day or that week.

When I worked as a neuropsychologist, some of my patients had multiple sclerosis which is a neurological condition, and part of our time together was spent on fatigue management strategies. There is a great tip in this area that I think we can take on board, and it’s also relevant if you have a chronic illness or if you have lower capacity at the moment for some reason. The strategy is to think about the day in three parts – the morning, the afternoon, and the evening, and only use two out of three of those times for higher energy activities, or activities that are most important.

For example, you might work part time on a Tuesday and Friday and are the primary carer for your kids as well. You probably don’t want to be going out with friends on a Friday night, because you’ve already used two sessions of the day – the morning and afternoon – for high energy work. You might choose to have an early night on Monday night before your first day at work, and on Friday nights as well, and then maybe you plan a project for Wednesday nights, and then intentionally keep Wednesday afternoons quiet. And then you might plan quality time with your partner on Thursday nights. So you see how we’re trying to balance out the day and the week, but plan activities in advance so that you are doing what you want to be doing, and you don’t have to spend mental energy deciding what to do.

The Importance of Your Environment

The next factor that is really important is the environment that you’re in. The environment is a huge trigger for habits. Your brain has environments and habits stored as pairs, where a certain environment is linked with a certain habit: for example, you put the kids to bed, you walk out to the lounge room with the couch, you sit down, and you pull out your phone or TV remote without even thinking, the couch is paired with this habit. Then, all of a sudden you’ve lost 45 minutes, and then you think oh well it’s too late to start anything new now (see you’re brain trying to trick you there?).

By planning in advance, you can find a new space in your house to do something else, maybe you and your partner go to the kitchen and bake together and chat and listen to music, and then you have yummy snacks for the kids lunchboxes. Or maybe you go into your bedroom and journal or do some yoga. If you can’t go into a different room, set up the room differently. Put books out in advance, or prepare your activity in some way so that it’s out and ready to go. Change the environment, and your brain is much less likely to trigger that habit.

Track Your Time

If changing up your evenings is still sounding a little difficult, don’t worry, our regular routines can feel like they’re the only solution until you really consciously map it out. So what I would suggest is to keep a time audit for a week or two. This involves using an app like Toggl where you can categorise your time, or just use a pen and paper if that’s easier. You can break it up into half hour blocks, or less if you are really keen, and if you colour code it for different activities, and you will be able to see everything really easily. You will soon see how you are spending your time, and by having this data in front of you, you’ll be able to move things around and group things together in a way that you might not have tried before.

My Own Evenings

So what have Evan and I planned to do in this season? Well we kept Monday night movie night of course, and we’re keeping Sunday nights as a so-called “work” night like we did last year, where Evan does work on a course that he’s taking, and I actually do the family budget every second Sunday night and work on my businesses the alternate Sunday. We dedicated a second work night on Thursday nights, and we chose Thursdays because this is a higher energy activity and it’s a day when Evan has worked from home and not travelled into the office.

I wanted a night where I could do some quiet activities alone, things like meditation and journaling and reading, and we decided that this would be Wednesdays, because sometimes on a Wednesday Evan and the kids go and play cards out of the house, and so I have time to myself, and on other Wednesdays Evan would choose his own solo activity. We then decided that we both wanted a night where we could both read the books we were each reading but be together in the same room, and we’ve never done this together but we both want to be reading more, so we thought this was a nice way to do it, and so we chose Tuesday nights for that because it’s a lower energy activity after Evan has been in the office all day.

Now the rest of the nights are actually not planned, we’re free to have an early night or watch TV or catch up on something else. Friday nights have always been “stay up nights” with the kids and we play card games or board games with them, and they are in bed at about 9pm instead of 8 so Evan and I prefer to just chat on the couch after that on a Friday night before bed.

So you can see that we’ve incorporated more of what we want, and we’ve planned it in advance so neither of us feel like we can just potter around doing nothing on those nights, and it means that we are doing less of something else, because remember we still have the same finite amount of time in the day and week. We are watching less TV overall, and leaving more chores to the weekend where we can get all four of the older kids to help out.

How It’s Actually Going!

Now this is a great plan that feels really good for our family, and helps us to move towards our goals. But it needs to be flexible, and I want to tell you about what actually happened this week so far. Right now it’s Friday, and so on Monday we did have movie night and it all went really well. It was a long movie and so if we hadn’t have aimed to stop bedtime at 7:45 in advance, we would have been up way too late or not finished the movie.

On Tuesday night, which we had planned to be our reading night, I actually felt really terrible, I was upset. I ended up cleaning the kitchen for about half an hour, and then I just wanted to watch TV (we’re watching Chef’s Table on Netflix and it’s really inspiring, you should check it out). I was feeling sad and had a bit of a cry with Evan and we had a talk and he was awesome because he’s super supportive, and so we went to bed fairly early, about 10pm.

So even though I talked earlier about using passive activities like screens to just avoid your feelings, I’m not saying that you should just never listen to your body and just rigidly stick to your schedule regardless of what’s happening in your life. I believe that you need a balance between sticking to your commitments of fulfilling activities, and doing what feels right and sustainable.

Now I’ll skip Wednesday for a second, on Thursday night it was actually the 23rd, and so this is date night for us every month, it’s the date we got together and it’s the date we got married two months ago, so we decided that we’d cook together and do an activity out of a couple’s cookbook that we have. So that meant that we didn’t have an extra worknight in the week. So we moved the extra worknight to Wednesday night.

However, on Wednesday night, Ruby, our baby who usually goes to bed at 7:30 and is a really great sleeper, she did not go to sleep. She seemed fine during the day, and then Evan put her to bed, and then after a while she and was standing up in the cot and crying and lying back down and crying some more, and so I went in and helped her out a little, and after about an hour Evan took over, and then an hour after that I took back over, and then Evan did some more settling, and she didn’t go to sleep until 11:30pm!

Turns out, she was teething and her first molar and another front tooth were popping out, so it was a bit of a rough evening. Needless to say we did precisely zero work, and instead did the online grocery order in between tag-teaming with Ruby.

So I tell you all this because sometimes the plan just does not go to plan, and we need to be a bit flexible. But I want to emphasise that it’s still so much more effective than having no plan or just deciding on the night, because you just won’t feel motivated to do anything new.

Unlock Your Evenings

So this is how I am unlocking more time in my week this year, and using it to do fulfilling activities, activities that bring me closer to my goals, and increasing the quality time that I spend with Evan. I hope that these tips have been helpful and that you can apply some of these ideas to your life. Come on over to Instagram or Substack and tell me what you’re going to be doing with your evenings this year.

I’m going to end with my favourite quote, it’s by Mary Oliver, “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.” See you next time!

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If you are ready to take the next step and reimagine your life, then my online time management course TIMEWISE is for you. If you want to spend your week doing meaningful work, quality play, and restful sleep, check out TIMEWISE.