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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: 7 THINGS I DID TO STOP WASTING MY EVENINGS AFTER WORK
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: 7 THINGS I DID TO STOP WASTING MY EVENINGS AFTER WORK
Speaker: Dr. Justin Sung (Head of Learning, iCanStudy)
links : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS-qrv8LlkM
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00:00 – INTRODUCTION
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Most people feel that feeling tired and drained after work is normal, and that evenings are always unproductive. But that is not true.
I’ve been a learning and productivity coach for the past 13 years, and I’ve helped over 30,000 people triple their productivity using research-based methods.
In this video, I’m going to share seven specific strategies that I’ve used to stop wasting my evenings and transform that time into something that is both productive and fulfilling.
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00:26 – STRATEGY #1: CALIBRATE YOUR NATURAL ENERGY LEVELS
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One of the most shocking discoveries for myself was realizing that the constant feeling of tiredness is not actually normal.
Starting from when I was in late high school, going through medical school, running a business on the side, working as a doctor—during that entire period of time, like 15 years, I was always tired. Like every single day I wanted to take a nap; every morning I’m waking up feeling like I just want to go back to sleep.
And it’s only when I quit being a medical doctor and then I had full control over my schedule did I realize that when I do give myself enough sleep and enough rest and recovery, I’m actually very rested.
This was a really important realization for me because I realized that my standard of what is “enough rest” or what is a “good level of energy” was completely skewed for pretty much my entire adult life. And for a lot of that time, I also believed in some pretty toxic mentalities around productivity, like the idea that you always have to be doing something productive, or that “sleep is for the weak” and “you can sleep when you’re dead.”
But the ironic thing is that that actually made me waste more of my time and waste more of my evenings. And this is because of this idea of tracking your energy levels.
If I draw it out like this: if we have energy here on the y-axis, and we have time here on the x-axis… this is what I thought was happening to me: that I would start the beginning of my day really energetic, and then throughout the day I get more tired, I go to sleep, I recover, and this cycle continues. So I’m basically starting really energized, getting tired throughout the day, and then as I sleep and recover, I restart on the next day.
What I didn’t realize is that it wasn’t like this at all. Because at no point was I really at optimum energy. And what I thought was my optimum was actually already at a completely compromised state.
The reality of what was happening was actually more like this: years of sleep deprivation and constantly sacrificing my recovery and rest had brought me down to this baseline, and I was just kind of fluctuating down here. And I’d begun to think that this was just normal.
The reason I never realized that there’s actually all of this energy I could still have is because when I go to sleep, I don’t feel drastically more energetic than any previous day. Once you let yourself get to this point, the amount of time it takes to actually recover back from this point is actually very, very, very long.
For me personally, it took probably 3 to 4 months of really focusing on getting enough sleep, not setting any alarms, just going to sleep and waking up only when I feel rested. This is why even when I went on leave—I took like two weeks off—I still came back at the end of my two weeks feeling pretty much just as tired as when I left. Evenings were not restorative; weekends were not restorative; leave was not restorative. And most of the time, who has 3 to 4 months just to do nothing?
And the difference was significant: I was sharper, I was faster, I was understanding and comprehending things more quickly, I was having better ideas, I was feeling happier and just more stable. And the really dangerous part is that I never realized that I was operating below my optimum for all those years.
So the secret is that you never want to get to this point down here—you never want to enter into that danger zone. You want to, if possible, stay high, and as you notice that you are starting to drop below a certain point, you want to then prioritize your rest and recovery in such a way that you can then quickly bounce back. If you stay in this optimum band, you can rest and recover fully after just a single night’s sleep, because you haven’t let yourself get so burned out for so long.
Takeaway: You can’t pour out of an empty cup. If you want to be more productive in the evenings, do you even have the energy to be productive in the evenings? Do some experimenting: look at your existing schedule, look at your sleep schedule, think about how much sleep that you’re getting, and then try to push that up a little bit. Once you figure out exactly how much rest you truly need (for me, that number is 9 hours in bed), you can understand your baseline.
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05:15 – STRATEGY #2: TREAT YOUR ENERGY LIKE A GENERATOR, NOT A BATTERY
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Most people think about their energy like a battery: they start charged, and then as the day goes on as they do activities, that drains down. The more stuff you do, the more busy you are, the more things you think about, the more drain you have on this battery. So if you get to the end of the day and you’re feeling really tired, what you have to do is don’t do anything and let that battery recharge. Doing nothing in the evenings can feel like the logical move.
When that happens, then you fall into what I call the “too tired” trap: where you feel like you are too tired to do anything, so you spend that time to rest, but then after you rest, you spend that energy on your daily life activities. At the end of that, you feel too tired to do anything else, so you feel too tired to spend whatever free time you have in the evenings on doing the things that you truly enjoy or find fulfillment in.
Not only do you feel too tired in the evenings, you now also feel lazy, unproductive, and guilty.
The switch for me which really allowed me to make very full use of these evenings was realizing that my energy is more like a generator, and that certain activities and tasks generate energy much faster than just resting and doing nothing.
Throughout pretty much my entire university life, I was spending most evenings either tutoring or learning about learning science, coaching people, or eventually building my business. It sounds exhausting that I was working 100, 110, 120 hours a week almost non-stop for years, but the reason I was able to have enough energy to work as a doctor is because in my evenings, I spent that time energizing myself with this task that I found a lot of fulfillment and energy from.
That doesn’t have to be work-related. That could be just spending time with your family, playing music, playing sports, having a hobby. When you treat your energy like a generator, you’re incentivized to do things in the evenings when you feel tired, because you know that doing things is the solution to your energy problem.
Guidelines for finding an energizing evening activity:
- Physical activity: Going to the gym, going for a walk.
- Cognitively effortful: Not something totally passive. Solving a puzzle, painting, or learning something new
Spending just 30 minutes in the evening to learn something new and interesting can really stack up to meaningful skills and progression in your life and your career.
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10:15 – STRATEGY #3: CUT THE TIREDNESS CYCLE
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It is completely possible to be spending your evenings constantly doing things, feeling busy, getting to the end of the day, looking back and thinking, “There is no free time I could have used to do something else,” and yet still feel it was unproductive and that the evening was wasted.
Usually what that means is not that you’re lazy or not using that time; it’s because the things that you’re doing in that time are not the things that you really feel will give you that fulfillment or move the needle towards the goals that are important to you.
Stop spending all of your time working, expecting that the more work you do, the better your result is going to be.
At a certain point, you’re not limited by how much work you’re doing. Even though the quantity of work was higher, the quality and alignment of what I was doing didn’t increase by the same amount. The quality of every decision, every piece of work, every problem was being sacrificed. You rob yourself of the mental freedom and time to think about things at a big-picture level, without the pressure of needing to complete tasks.
Takeaway: Every evening, give yourself just:
– One main goal.
– And maybe one stretch goal.
If you’re feeling low in energy, do your generating activity to re-energize yourself. And if you still feel like you’re trying to pour out of an empty cup, give yourself permission to just chill out and not do anything without feeling the guilt.
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13:23 – STRATEGY #4: THE “OR – NOT – AND” STRATEGY
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If you want to say yes to the things that really matter to you, you have to say no to something else. There’s no such thing as “not having enough time”; there is such a thing as “not being a priority.”
Let’s say you have a list of all the things that you want to do in an evening. Your ideal is that you want to get to the end of the day and check off every single thing. The reality is that you’ll get to the end of the day having only done a couple of these things.
If you don’t realize that reality is the norm, then every single evening will feel like a waste of time and you’ll feel bad about it, because you see everything you wanted to do but couldn’t do.
Instead of saying “I’m going to do this AND this AND this”, use the “OR” framing: “Should I do this OR this?”
Takeaway: Write down the things that you feel would make your perfect evening. For each item, write what your buffer time is. Buffer time is the amount of leeway you have where you could not have it as a high priority, and you could still recover from it later (e.g., missing family dinner for 1–2 days is recoverable, so your buffer is 2–3 days). When you understand your buffer time, you can safely say “no” to non-urgent items without guilt.
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16:11 – STRATEGY #5: WIN THE WEEK, NOT THE DAY
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The tendency is to want to do as many things in a single day as possible—we measure how good a day was based on our productivity. Because of this, it feels really bad to cut the day short when you feel like you could squeeze a little bit more out of it.
Strategy #5 is: Have a wind-down routine. Win the week, not the day. Sacrifice 30 minutes on that day; don’t try to win the day, aim to win the week.
When you do not wind down properly at night, it sacrifices your sleep quality, cuts your rest, and triggers the tiredness cycle again tomorrow.
3 Guidelines for a wind-down routine:
- Duration: At least 30 minutes (ideally 60–90 minutes).
- No Screen Time: Install an app blocker, turn on “Do Not Disturb”, avoid screens completely until sleep (except setting an alarm).
- Slow down your thoughts: Do something that calms your mind. Do some journaling/writing to unload mental clutter, or read a physical book.
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20:12 – STRATEGY #6: CREATE PROCRASTINATION SPACE
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“Revenge bedtime procrastination”: When you are so busy throughout the day and feel you have no control, you stay up late at night doomscrolling or bingeing media to exert control before going to bed.
The way you combat that is to give yourself designated procrastination blocks throughout the day.
Takeaway: Set up “Freedom Windows.”
For example, schedule five 5-minute blocks during the day where you unblock your apps and allow yourself to scroll Instagram, browse, or do whatever you want without guilt. Because you give yourself permission to slack off in small doses during the day, your brain won’t feel the desperate urge to rebel and procrastinate at bedtime.
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22:00 – STRATEGY #7: AVOID ENERGY DEAD SPOTS
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Identify which parts of your day or which activities cause a sharp drop in your energy levels.
For many people, the commute back home from work is an energy dead spot (e.g., sitting stuck in traffic for an hour on the bus leaves you feeling lethargic and wanting a nap).
Takeaway: Locate your energy dead spots and either bypass them or convert them into energizing activities:
– Stay at work an extra 45–60 minutes to let rush hour traffic pass, and use that time for personal planning, reading, or learning.
– Go straight to the gym or exercise immediately after work before heading home.
– Switch your commute method (e.g., taking the train instead of driving so you can read, listen to podcasts, or relax actively).
Think about your schedule not just in terms of “Time”, but in terms of “Activities and Energy.”
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24:24 – CONCLUSION & SUMMARY
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Summary of the 7 Strategies:
- Calibrate your natural energy levels.
- Treat your energy like a generator, not a battery.
- Cut the tiredness cycle (1 main goal + 1 stretch goal).
- The “or – not – and” strategy.
- Win the week, not the day (have a wind-down routine).
- Create procrastination space (freedom windows).
- Avoid energy dead spots.
