In Episode 037, we discussed the power of routines in your day, and specifically, your morning routine. In this episode, we cover the evening routine and how to make your evening routine a productivity enabler in your life.

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In this Cast | The Evening Routine

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Francis Wade

Show Notes | The Evening Routine

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Outlook

Skedpal

Evernote

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Dr. Roy Baumeister

Apple Pencil

Goodnotes

Remind Me Pro

10 Evening Routines That Will Make You Productive at Work and Life

The 4-Step Journey To A Productive Evening Routine

Checker Plus

Blue Light Blocking Glasses

Google Calendar

Remember the Milk

18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman

Raw Text Transcript | The Evening Routine

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Voiceover Artist 0:00

Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling, productive life? Then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity, here are your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

Welcome back everybody to productivity cast the weekly show about all things productivity. I'm recently Smith and I'm joined here today with my co host Augusto Pinaud how's it going?

Augusto Pinaud 0:27

it's going awesome. Good morning. How are you today? Good day.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:31

How's it going, Francis? Francis Wade. Good. Good. Good to be here. So in the last episode, we talked about morning routines. So if you haven't yet listened to that episode, I highly recommend that you hop back over there and listen to us discuss the importance of sort of defining routines. So we defined routines and the importance and benefits of having a routine in this episode, we're going to kind of continue that conversation and switch that to the African noon and or evening routine. No, we're just going to lump this under evening routines, even though it could possibly cover some of our late afternoon activities. And what we're going to do is just go round robin again, as we did last episode, and talk about each of our various routines. So I

Francis Wade 1:17

think I mentioned last episode that I plan I make a schedule for the day

use a number of tools to do that including outlook sketchpad and I go to my go to my Evernote sort of plan for the week. So the mornings tend to be fairly well executed according to plan. However, the afternoons when everything started was the heck, I lose steam at around one o'clock their boats and going to like a extended crash. So I'd have lunch at about one 130 is my normal routine. And that's probably the last productive for the day because I start early and I, you know, I go full steam ahead until about 130 breakfast, I don't do anything brain related for lunch. Usually, I'm usually watching something on Netflix or fooling around on on Facebook or no one again, I might do better heavy reading. But I usually am pretty tired. And then in the afternoon, I try to stick to active activities like returning phone calls, short term things like paying the bills actually have designation in scan power for what's called a time map zone in the afternoon called dead dead branded activities. So I serve all my branded activities into the afternoon because it's it's highly unlikely that I'll do anything that's really really involves any heavy lifting errands, I prefer to do them in the afternoon, anything that doesn't require sort of the flow state or concentrated work. So it tends to be very, sort of haphazard and chip shop, I have become better at following my schedule in the afternoon, because I sort of better at scheduling my day in general, and keeping it updated. But it's rare that I would do something really outstanding in the afternoon and say, oh, man, I was the best part of the day, that's usually not gonna happen, just it it am tired. And, and there's usually some disruptions that by the end of the day, I'm at least somewhat off kilter. Whereas on the morning, I'm more in control. And then I stopped working at about six on the average day, I rarely go past rarely go past six. So that's my average today. That's a

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:33

routine for me what it sounds like, Good advice for listeners is that those who do, you know, start their day, really strong and early, more systems, more ways in which to benefit your future self in the day is going to be helpful to you, right, the more structure as you lose capacities and your energy, you know, just basically energy for the day, you need to make sure that you have kind of things put into place so that you can have a well worn path in that routine, you probably know about decision fatigue.

Francis Wade 4:09

Yeah, so when you set up a plan for the day, the theory is that you're doing your heaviest planning, when you have the most bandwidth if you're a morning person, I guess if you're, if you're a night old kind of person, evening person, you might do it before going to bed, because you probably have the energy at 1112 o'clock and you plan the next day at that point. Anyway, the idea is that you match your best energy and your highest creativity with the hardest task of planning the day so that when you get to the afternoon, in my case, I don't have to do another choosing or are selecting or a lot of heavy lifting to decide what to work on next May would I what I call it my my training and my book switching, my switching occurs in the afternoon in a more sort of planned way, I would say I there's certain items I want to tried to do. I won't try to start reading an article in the afternoon. I usually don't edit one. I though I may do research. So certain activities are strictly prohibited from the morning and they're only done in the afternoon. So that's, that's you're absolutely right, taking away the choice making a choice at 330 after I talked after a tough but a long day is like the hardest thing to do. So I want to take away the choice if you can, the need to choose. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:28

let's switch gears to you a boost. Okay, so what's your evening routine and how does that contrast with your morning routine, since you didn't have a chance to talk about it,

Augusto Pinaud 5:38

my my morning routine is superstructure. Okay? I tend to write on the journal I tend to tend to write them on my journal, I tend to prevent review my goals and I do that every morning pan. And the reason I do that every morning is because allow me to set direction you know, it is as Francis was saying, at that time, I tend to have the the strongest wheel and as the day progress that tends to go downhill. So reviewing the direction that I'm taking in the morning allow me to make better calls and better decisions as today progress so for that reason I checked them daily so that's part of why I get quiet time I get prayer time those are things that are part of of my morning routine but he's pretty strict on pretty rigid if you may, okay I need that that time of reflection of making sure things I that I'm preparing for the day after that's up then I go to to work and to do things then I start interacting with with the world I usually do not interact with the world on tool I have half that morning check copper teen done on my night routine. It usually happen I have kids I so it's usually after kids are to bed, it basically goes into closure today. So I go and again review my goals. Why? Well, because he I like to go and shut down with the idea of knowing where I'm trying to go. So that's that's the second thing I do. And then I try to look at that time I am you know that that laid guy. So for many, many years, I used to joke that I belong to the our club. And I was a guy who was fake up on till really late. And at some point I discover that if instead of staying on till really late, I go to bed early and wake up earlier than everybody and get quiet time. So I tried to wake up around 430 in the morning, what was going to do I was going to be able to do in that hour and a half before the world is up and before the people is interacting in many cases, I'm able to accomplish more than what I can accomplish on the next four. So because of that I try to get into that early time and do only super high impact things. Okay, that's another time to check Facebook. That's not the time to that's the time of doing tasks that are high impact task. And then but I planned them at night before before I go to bed. You know, I don't negotiate with myself. My wake up time in the morning. I do that at night at night. I am a pretty reasonable guy in the morning when the alarm sound I am not therefore I do my best to plan that time of what time I'm going to wake up and what is what I'm going to do at night and not in the morning when I wake up.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:56

Great. Great. And can you can you talk a little bit about the the tools you use to help you be in control of your evening routine. any kinds of analog or physical?