Reclaim Your Evenings as Recovery Blocks

Planning what you’ll do during your ‘golden hours’ — the stretch between work and bed — makes time feel expansive and satisfying.

Note from Charlie: Laura shared a review copy of Big Time with me. I had been working on upgrading my golden hours (evening time) prior to reading the book and was elated that she’s already written about it in the book. And that she agreed to write about it here, too. Get your copy today!

Most of us know we should take breaks. Plenty of research has found that breaks boost energy and mood. But many of us also think of breaks as simply stopping working for a while. That’s part of it. But to make the most of these recovery blocks (as Charlie puts it) it helps to think of what you actually intend to do with this time. It’s impossible to do nothing. You’ll do something, but certain somethings can be more rejuvenating than other things.

That’s what I found while researching Big Time, my new book on time management. I did several projects where I had hundreds of people try out strategies for making time feel more expansive and satisfying. One of those involved asking people to pro-actively plan in two breaks during their workdays. I asked people to think ahead of time about what they would do during these short breaks with an eye toward doing things that would add to their energy levels.

Faced with this challenge, people got quite creative. They took walks (even up and down the stairs). They read novels. They meditated. They played with the dogs while working at home. Curiously, most people chose two different break intentions each day (e.g., reading in the morning, walking in the afternoon), thus creating a break “portfolio” that made work a little more interesting. Coupled with some other strategies, this led to people feeling less distracted and less exhausted within a week.

I also challenged people to choose intentional leisure at night. Weekday evenings are a recovery block in their own right. Ideally you reset your energy levels before going back to work the next day. Yet because people are tired after work, they tend not to use this time intentionally, often seeing it disappear into mindless screen time. So I asked people to choose, ahead of time, an intentional leisure activity they could do for 30 minutes during what I like to call their “golden hours” (after work, before bed). Some people called friends, went to an exercise class, played outside with the kids, or read a book. Screen time was OK if it was chosen — for instance, 30 minutes of a favorite show planned into the evening so you could look forward to it.

After a week of this, people were far more likely to agree with the statements “Yesterday, I had enough time for the things I wanted to do” and “Yesterday, I did not waste time on things that weren’t important to me.” People even felt more rested, because it turns out that when you proactively build rejuvenating leisure into your evenings, you don’t have to stay up late to get it. It’s a win all around.

The point of leisure activities isn’t just to boost your energy for work, of course. But I do think that one of the reasons people feel like they don’t have enough time is that we don’t take advantage of the leisure time that is available to us to do what we’d most enjoy. We do whatever is there. Actively choosing how to spend these recovery blocks makes them feel like they happened — and that is definitely a good thing.

~Laura

Laura Vanderkam is the author of Big Time: How to Have More Time for What Matters, along with several other books on time and productivity, including Off the Clock and 168 Hours. She writes and speaks about how successful people structure their days, and her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Fast Company. Learn more at lauravanderkam.com.