Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to adopt the mindset that after five pm it's Friday. You just might find yourself feeling more relaxed and enjoying your time after work. More so, over the past year or so, I've become more and more interested in how people spend their evening hours. In another year or two, I'll publish a book called The Golden Hours.
I'm making the most of your weekday evenings. This time is so hard to use well. People are tired, and in many cases we have family or household responsibilities. But it's also a lot of time to simply write off. I collected time logs from a ton of people to analyze their evenings, and I can report that on average, people had about five hours after they finished work and
before they went to bed on weekdays. Multiply that by four nights from Monday to Thursday, and we are talking twenty hours a week of potential family and leisure time. Of course, one of the reasons it's hard to really relax and enjoy this time is that we know we are going to work the next day, there will need to be preparations for getting up early in school schedules and activities and so forth. But honestly, if you have young kids, you may be up early on weekends anyway.
You have the activities then as well. And yet in general people still feel more relaxed on weekends. So here's an idea to contemplate. Not too long ago, Professor Cassei Holmes was a guest on this show. She talked about one of her studies or she found that when people were told to treat their upcoming weekends like a vacation, they generally enjoyed themselves more. So, if thinking of the weekend as a vacation can make it more enjoyable, then I think thinking of a weeknight as a weekend might
do the same thing. So repeat this phrase to yourself after five pm it's Friday, even if it is five pm on a Tuesday, there is no reason not to feel like you are off and relaxed and enjoying some restorative time. You can linger over your dinner even if it's Tuesday, and you can enjoy your downtime at night, after your chores or after your kids go to bed, even if it is a weekday. My guest is you don't stay up all that late on Friday night if you've been working all week. So we're not even talking
about not upsetting any sleep schedules. We're just not approaching the next day as some battle to be prepared for tomorrow is going to happen one way or the other. So after five pm, it's Friday. I really like this phrase, and I have been experimenting with saying it to myself. Now. Obviously a pithy phrase can't actually make a Tuesday into a Friday. You should probably still go to work on Wednesday, but it does make the time feel a little different,
at least for me. Perhaps you will find this phrase helpful as well. In the meantime, This is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.