The Offline Evening Menu: What to Do Instead of Scrolling

For nights when you’d rather have an evening than optimize one.

The dishes are done, or just enough to become tomorrow’s problem. You sit down on the couch with the clear intention of relaxing, and your hand has picked up your phone before you’ve made any decision at all.

Forty minutes later you’ve watched a stranger reorganize a pantry she clearly didn’t need to reorganize, and you know something about the history of a sandwich. Most of us wouldn’t call that enjoyment. It’s more like the evening happened near us.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot while exploring more analog ways to spend time. I’m not here to tell you to throw your phone in a lake. I like the internet. I spend plenty of time on it, and some of what’s on there is wonderful. I just don’t love that it has become the default answer to every spare ten minutes.

The phone wins because it asks nothing of you

Here’s my theory. We haven’t forgotten that books and hobbies and walks exist. We know they’re out there. But at the end of a day spent making decisions for work, for the house, and possibly for other people, deciding how to relax can feel like one more task.

The phone doesn’t ask you to decide. It doesn’t need supplies or a plan or a clear surface. It’s already in your hand, doing its job with terrifying efficiency.

So I stopped thinking about willpower and started thinking about ordering food. When you’re tired and hungry and can’t think, a menu helps. You don’t have to invent dinner from nothing. You just look at what’s available and point.

That’s the whole idea behind The Offline Evening Menu. It’s a short list of things you could do instead, sitting where you’ll see it, so the thought oh, right, I could do that arrives before the scrolling starts.

It’s a menu, not a to-do list

There are enough checklists in the world, and I refused to add another one. You don’t work through this one. You don’t have to pick something from every category, and you’re allowed to pick nothing.

Ideas for an offline evening

Read. A few chapters of your current book. An old magazine. A short story, or some poetry if you’re feeling fancy. That book you’ve been saving for the right moment. Or ten pages of absolutely anything. If you read three pages and decide you’re finished, you’ve still read three pages. Nobody is auditing your annual total.

Make. Draw or paint something badly on purpose. Write something by hand. Pick up the craft you abandoned in a bag somewhere. Bake something, make a playlist, or fix the thing that’s been sitting on the counter waiting to be fixed.

Move. Take an evening walk, stretch, or put on music and wander around the house. Stand outside for a while. Do something gentle with your body. There’s no step count here and no goal. You’ve probably been sitting down since this morning, and a short change of position is can be enough to pull you out of a funk.

Tend. Water the plants. Reset one small room (one, not the whole house). Take a long shower or bath, prepare something for tomorrow, or work on a personal project.

I put this category in because sometimes handling one small thing makes the whole evening feel better. The catch is that you deliberately choose it. The moment it feels like an assignment, put it down.

Connect. Call someone. Write a letter or a card. Play a game together, or sit somewhere and have an actual conversation, the kind where nobody is half-looking at a screen. If there’s someone you’ve been meaning to see, invite them to do something later this week. It’s very possible to spend an entire evening watching other people’s lives without talking to a single one of them. I have a digital journal with ideas and prompts for real life connections.

Do absolutely nothing. This might be my favorite. Sit outside. Listen to an album, the whole thing. Stare out a window. Make a drink and get comfortable somewhere, or go to bed early. Be bored for a little while, which most of us haven’t tried in years.

Nobody needs to turn this into a mindfulness practice, and you don’t have to journal about it afterward. An evening of doing nothing is allowed to simply be an evening of doing nothing.

A few ways to make the better option the easier one

None of this needs to be elaborate. The less setup something requires, the less likely it is to happen at 8:45 on a tired night.

Leave a book on the coffee table, or a notebook next to your chair. Keep a puzzle somewhere you walk past. Let different evenings have different energy levels, since some nights you’ll bake and some nights listening to one album is all you’ve got, and both count. Don’t treat the phone like a punishment you’re serving. You can love the internet and still want a few hours without it.

And let yourself change your mind. If you start reading and realize you’d rather sit outside, go sit outside. It’s your evening, not a syllabus.

Some evenings will also be forgettable. Some will be boring. Some will end with you asleep during a movie you picked yourself. That’s fine, and it’s a normal part of having evenings.

Want a printable copy you can keep?

You can get The Offline Evening Menu through the Drewett & Co. Everything Page. It’s free when you join the email list:

Tonight’s choice

There’s plenty of advice out there about making better use of your evenings: build a routine, learn a skill, make every hour count. Some people enjoy all that, and good for them.

But I’d like to defend the evening that doesn’t produce anything. You can read something that teaches you nothing, or make something nobody will ever see. You can listen to the album you’ve heard a hundred times.

Mostly, I’d just like us to arrive at the couch having decided something, even if the decision is to look out the window for a while.

Drewett & Co. is a place for curiosity, independent thinking, practical creativity, and finding a little more enjoyment in everyday life. Explore more ideas for spending time away from your screen in the Reference Desk.