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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is that 30 minutes can change your evening.

Setting one 30-minute intention for a weekday evening can make the evening feel like it is something to look forward to

and can make this time feel like it truly exists.

Today's tip comes out of my recent September reset project. I had people track their time during the month of September,

and then try out several of my favorite time management strategies.

One of these strategies was to set evening intentions, that is, to try to make what I like

to call the golden hours of each weekday better. Weekday evenings have been something of an obsession

for me lately because, well, very few people use them well. People are tired after a long day at work or

school or spent caring for family members. This time can feel like a second shift of doing chores

and getting people to bed, or sometimes it has spent mindlessly on screen time and puttering,

things that feel so forgettable that people don't even notice

they are doing them.

The issue with all this is that many people's evenings are actually quite long.

In my projects, I have found that many people are done with work by 5.30 or so, and most people are not in bed before 10.30 p.m.

That is five hours. It's a lot of time to write off as unusable. Now, in my perfect world,

people would think through all five hours and think of how to spend this time in ways that

were meaningful and enjoyable for themselves and the people they care about. In the real world,

I know that is unrealistic, and we do have obligations for this time. I know I spend a lot of time

...