How to take back your evenings

As a teacher, my life is particularly busy. I start the day early – around 6am – with my morning routine. Then I’ll get to work, put in a full shift, mark after the final bell rings, do some exercise, get out for a Food Shop, have some free time, before getting 8 hours of sleep and doing it all again.

Does that sound unrealistic?

That’s because it is.

In reality, my days had involved two alarms to get me out of bed. I’d get to work and mark some work and print my resources, teach all day and then do the food shop and conk out in front of the telly, dragging myself up the wooden hill to bed, doom scrolling and getting way fewer than 8 hours of sleep.

Does that sound more familiar?

What I was doing wasn’t particularly healthy and meant that a lot of my time and energy was being funnelled into my job. When I got home, I’d be carrying out basic survival functions and then performing what’s called revenge bedtime procrastination. The idea behind this is that you end up staying up way later than you should, doom scrolling, as a way to take back some free time for yourself as a result of your normally very busy life.

They call it revenge because it isn’t really that good for you.

For me, it was really frustrating since it meant less time for the hobbies and activities that I enjoy. Here’s how I took back my evenings.

Social media blockers

Going on Tik Tok or Instagram or Reddit is so easy that it’s a great way to switch off after work and rest your brain. But it’s not particularly healthy or productive. Now, I’m not suggesting that we need to spend every waking moment in a productive mindset – that wouldn’t be healthy either, and it’d be a clear example of toxic productivity.

However, spending every evening scrolling without a purpose is the definition of brain rot. How is that any kind of way to live?

I’ve gone into depth about why I dislike social media so much and how I’ve combatted my own social media addiction, which you can read about here, but in short: block your phone. There are blockers that you can add onto your phone, which are built into the operating system, to limit your screen time on each app. Set that to however many minutes that you actually want to spend on social media and your phone will automatically kick you off once that’s elapsed.

Need even more help? Use an app blocker to give you a second to question whether you actually want to start scrolling on Instagram or the like. I use the app One Sec and would really recommend it, but there are a dozen clones that you can find on the App Store. It won’t stop you from using a time-sucking app (though I do know that some apps do restrict you from using an app entirely at certain times of day), but it will give you a second to rethink whether this is something that you actually want to spend your time on.

Do what you love

There is absolutely nothing wrong with sitting down and watching TV or movies all night every so often, and you should absolutely not feel guilty if that brings you joy. However, if you’re doing that just because it’s easy, and not because you want to, you might want to sit down and think again.

What do you actually want to spend your time doing? Do you want to read a book? Follow a new sport? Get involved in a new or old hobby? I recently took up drawing again after not having done any for years and loved the hours that it took to finish. Brainstorm what it is that brings you joy and keep that list handy for creating what’s called an ideal perfect week.

Crafting the ideal perfect week

Last year, I felt myself wanting to cram too much into my weeks. I wanted to all of the exercising, all of the learning and all of the hobbies alongside my full time job, and that just wasn’t turning out to be very feasible. It was also a very easy way to get annoyed at myself for being unable to do it all.

That’s when I stumbled upon Ali Abdaal’s concept of an Ideal Perfect Week. If all else was perfect in a week, and nothing out-of-the-ordinary happened, how would you choose to spend your time?

There are certain non-negotiables, like when I have to be at work and when I have to run extra curricular activities but, aside from those, our time should be our own. So, I made my Ideal Perfect Week and tried my very best to stick to it. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a great reminder of what I know that I want to be doing instead of loafing about doom scrolling.

To create your own Ideal Perfect Week, load up Google Calendar on desktop and create a new calendar. Pick a fun colour for all of the events in this calendar so that they stick out amongst any other additions, like unavoidable meetings or dental appointments. Then, add in as separate events every single thing that you would like to do in a day.

If we take my Tuesday as an example, I start work at 08:30 and have that pencilled in until 15:30. Then, until 17:00, I do PPA – which is basically where teachers aren’t timetabled for any lessons but expected to work. During the school day, these are usually referred to as ‘free periods’, but I use the term to refer to any time that I know that I want to use to get extra work done outside of regular hours. This could be for marking or planning, and I might do this on site or at home – wherever I feel that I will work best on any particular day.

Then, I’ll take a break for dinner and do some exercise in the evening. I might still change when this happens – and I might add in time for learning or for chilling out – but having it pencilled in as an event that I must do in a given day helps to force me to do it, since I know that it’s something that will make me happy. These kinds of strategies help me to maintain that ever-essential work-life balance.

What do you do to keep yourself on track? How does your perfect week look? I’d love to read all about it in the comments below.

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Hardly Hamilton

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