The idea of an evening routine is to calm the mind to facilitate a night of longer and better quality sleep. This makes it so much easier to master the next morning (and the next day). 

My evening routine has five relaxing (but still useful) steps.

It all starts with turning on my evening playlist and reading something technical for 5-10 minutes. I try to time it so that I’m done roughly at the end of the first song on my playlist (below). 

Candidates for this reading session fall into the category of “boring but important.” For example, this habit helped me read all 600 pages of the 2018 World Energy Outlook – not exactly riveting reading material, but vital for my research. 

Then I do a final check over my to-do list. This just takes a minute and usually gives me a lovely sense of completion, putting my mind at ease for the night. After that, I put my PC to sleep and turn off the lights as an official gesture that all productive activities for the day are now done. 

Then comes a relatively new addition to my evening routine: 10 minutes of guided meditation using Headspace. Despite some initial skepticism, I was quite impressed with the product and had no problems maintaining this habit for almost 50 days now. 

I end with a 5-minute Rodney Yee PM yoga session (which I do from memory), followed by a 15 minute session in my luxurious massage chair. During this 20 minutes, I do something interesting with my mind called an “emotion safari”. We’ll get to that in a couple of weeks. 

In total, this whole routine takes just a little over 30 minutes. I’ve been doing most elements of this routine for a long time, but only properly formalized the whole package a little over a month ago. Since then, I’ve actually seen a clear increase in my sleep quality from about 70% to about 80% (see the jump from the blue dots to the red dots in the graph below).

So, I hope you can get around to building a nice evening routine of your own. It’s proven to be quite valuable in my case. 

See you tomorrow for the final morning routine post!