How To Create An Evening Routine

In general, I would consider myself to be a pretty productive person. Over the past year, I’ve been able to spend time finding new ways to be more productive and streamline certain areas of my life. By far one of the most helpful things I do is create a morning routine.

While my mornings were extremely productive, it meant that my evenings were turning into a catch-all for my free time. If I didn’t accomplish something during the day it was just tacked on to my evening before bedtime. It was that realization that I found out I didn’t have an evening routine.

Don’t get me wrong, I could sit on the couch with James and binge watch YouTube videos or watch endless episodes of The Good Doctor. Then, after all that, sit on my phone until I was ready to go to bed. I might have described your very own evening routine. I’ve found that this is the case for most people. We’re not getting the deep sleep we need, and we wake up feeling like we barely slept at all.

So, I started to put together an evening routine! I’m going to walk you through each of the steps I took to build my own routine, so you can build one too!

Make a List of the Things You Want to Accomplish

Start by making a list of all the things you want to accomplish before you go to bed. Some of these things might be things you’re already doing.

For me, this included tidying up the house and making sure I had all the stuff for tomorrow’s breakfast, lunch & dinner. These were things that were important to me, so I made time to do them all before bed.

My current list looks like this:

• Ingredients for tomorrow’s breakfast, lunch & dinner
• Pick up around the house
• Run the dishwasher if full and hand wash any leftover
• Make sure the cats were fed
• Take off my makeup
• Make sure the doors, windows, and cars are locked
• Kids are in bed with lights out
• Read my devotional, and a couple chapters out of my current book

Prioritize!

Now that you know what you’d like to be doing the night before, it’s time to prioritize this list. You will likely only be able to do a few things before bed. To help you prioritize your list, assign it a number based on its importance.

Reading my devotional and book are really important so that’s why it goes first. If I don’t make it a priority, it often doesn’t get done.

Here is my same list prioritized:

• Read my devotional, and a couple chapters out of my current book
• Make sure the doors, windows, and cars are locked
• Ingredients for tomorrow’s breakfast, lunch & dinner
• Kids are in bed with lights out
• Make sure the cats were fed
• Pick up around the house
• Run the dishwasher if full and hand wash any leftover
• Take off my makeup

Decide On A Start Time

Now that you know what your priorities are, it’s time to set a start time for your evening routine. This should be when you start winding down for the night.

You should try to shoot for the same time, even on weekends. My start time is around 9pm, and I try to stick to this as much as possible.

Assign A Logical Order

The best way to create a consistent routine in the evenings is by doing the same exact thing in the same order. As I’m checking on the kids I can make sure there are no leftover dishes in their rooms.

For me, it looks like this:

1. Read my devotional, and a couple chapters out of my current book
2. Make sure the doors, windows, and cars are locked
3. Make sure the cats were fed
4. Pick up around the house
5. Kids are in bed with lights out
6. Run the dishwasher if full and hand wash any leftovers
7. Check for ingredients for tomorrow’s breakfast, lunch & dinner
8. Take off my makeup

My evening routine is extremely flexible, but it allows me to get everything I want to do before bed done in a logical order. It would be silly to lock the doors if the kids are still running it and out of the house.

That’s it! You have an evening routine!

Morning routines come naturally to me, but my evening routine is still taking a bit of work. Once you’ve created your routine, give it a test run. If things don’t work like you hoped or you need more time, adjust until you get it right.

YOUR TURN: What’s your evening routine? Let me know in the comments below!

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