Mark often tells listeners to work on their internet business every day. But what happens when you get home from your day job exhausted and cannot even decide what to work on? In this short video post, Mark shares a simple life hack for solving that problem.

The Productivity Hack

The trick is to decide what you are going to work on at the beginning of the day, or even better, the night before. Pick one or two specific tasks that you will accomplish in your internet business the following evening.

This solves two problems at once:

Decision fatigue is eliminated. When you arrive home tired from work, you do not have to think about what to do. The decision was already made when you had the mental energy to make it. You simply execute what past-you decided.

Self-negotiation becomes harder. When you have made an agreement with yourself the day before, it is harder to justify skipping the work. You already decided. The negotiation about whether to work or watch television is over before it starts. You made a commitment to yourself, and honoring that commitment becomes the path of least resistance.

Why This Works

This advice sounds almost too simple, but it addresses one of the biggest reasons part-time entrepreneurs lose momentum. It is not that they lack motivation or knowledge. It is that after a full day of work, they sit down and feel paralyzed by the number of things they could be doing. That paralysis leads to doing nothing, which leads to guilt, which leads to avoiding the business entirely.

By pre-deciding your tasks, you turn your evening work session into execution mode rather than planning mode. Planning requires energy. Execution of a known task requires much less.

What Has Changed Since This Post

Mark published this in November 2013. The advice is timeless.

This concept is now widely recognized as “time blocking” or “task batching.” Productivity experts like Cal Newport (Deep Work), James Clear (Atomic Habits), and others have built entire frameworks around the idea of pre-deciding what you will work on. Mark was teaching this from practical experience before it became mainstream productivity advice.

Digital tools make this easier than ever. Apps like Todoist, Notion, and even simple calendar blocking in Google Calendar make it straightforward to plan tomorrow's tasks tonight. The principle Mark teaches here — decide before you need to execute — remains one of the most effective productivity strategies for part-time entrepreneurs.

Listen and Subscribe

Listen to Late Night Internet Marketing on Apple Podcasts or subscribe at latenightim.com/internet-marketing-podcast/.