A lot of people have been emailing me lately and saying,
“I have these big goals I want to work on when I get home, but I can’t seem to muster the energy. How do I stop procrastinating and (learn French / teach myself to play the bass guitar / learn to become a Database Administrator)?”
This is a common enough request that I thought I’d write a short post about it.
The answer is really simple:
You don’t.
Problem solved!
You don’t try to have energy at the end of the day.
It’s normal to be drained at the end of the day. You spent the whole day spending your energy, see?
Willpower is finite and it’s highest in the morning. That means that after work is probably the worst time to try to learn the bass guitar, practice a language, or tackle a difficult topic like database administration.
Willpower, in general, is quite limited and in short supply, as I wrote in The Fierce Gentleman’s Guide to Building Willpower. There are ways to build it, but they are long-term changes, not quick fixes! — and not the easiest way to start behavior change.
There is one way I can think of to have energy at the end of the day: don’t do much of anything all day.
I’ll actually use this method at times, such as when I know I’m leading an event in the evening and following it up with a big social night out when I’ll be out until 1 or 2am (doesn’t happen often.) It’s still going to take a coffee or green tea right around 5pm to make sure I can be “on” all the way through.
For those of you who have consistently high-stress, demanding jobs, this is not much of a viable option: in which case, you could try Plan B, which would be to take a 26-minute nap immediately after getting home from work. This will boost your focus and productivity for the following 6 hours (according to NASA studies).
Presumably, some people will be able to use that brain hack to get serious productivity flowing in the evening hours. Be careful, though; the flip side is that this may delay your onset of sleep and throw off your regular sleep schedule, so use it with caution.
This is why I think the most honest answer is that the evening is simply not a great time to tackle projects. Unless you’re someone who genuinely doesn’t wake up until 11 or noon but can then burn the midnight oil productively until 3 or 4am, what I recommend you do instead is shift your day so you have more time in the morning: use a routine such as the Hour of Power suggested by Tony Robbins (which has brought me great results – you can learn it for free here) or create your own morning schedule so you have 1-3 hours of uninterrupted time in the morning to ‘set the day.’
We’ve written before about both the power of rest and how to get up early and would recommend you review both those articles.
This keystone habit of getting up early has changed my life probably more than any other. The uninterrupted time in the quiet of the morning allows you to pre-visualize your success for the day, like a pre-game rehearsal, and this makes a big difference in how you respond to events throughout the day.
This is not a new technique, by the way — the Tibetan wise men call it penpa tang, which means something like “setting the day” and is close to another phrase that means “shooting an arrow,” and the basic outline of this technique appears in ancient esoteric books such as the Sutra of Golden Light.
Even more practically, by creating more time in the morning, you can go to the gym, go for a run, or do whatever other physical activity you please, and get your brain pumped full of oxygen and blood, which will have you arriving at work sharper, more mentally alert, and more ready for whatever the day holds.
And then there’s the final benefit, which is simply free time to do…whatever you wish. Once you’ve gotten the brain up, pumped it full of oxygen and blood and alertness, and sharpened it with some quiet time, it is now PRIMED to start learning, or entering into deliberate practice on the skill you want to learn.
Then, you can truly enjoy the end of your day — come home, enfold your loving family in your arms, eat a languid and nutritious meal, listen to relaxing music or take in an enchanting entertainment, and drift off to blissful sleep with your people close by your side, secure in the knowledge that when the morning rises, you will already have been hard at work perfecting your craft for hours — or that sufficient unto tomorrow will be the challenges of that day — or that you have truly lived this day to its fullest, regretting nothing and making full use of the 24 hours we are all given equally.
We hope this helped. Let us know in the comments if you have questions or suggestions.
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