47 Things to Do When You've Finally Put the Phone Down

You know that thing where it is 8:47 on a Tuesday evening, and you realise you have been on your phone for almost two hours, and you genuinely cannot remember any of what you saw on it, and you put the phone down on the arm of the couch, and your brain immediately says "...now what?"

This list is for that moment. Save it, screenshot it, print it out and stick it on the inside of a kitchen cupboard. Then the next time you find yourself doomscrolling out of pure end-of-day boredom, you have somewhere else for your attention to go.

These are not hobbies. Most of them take five to thirty minutes. They are just real things to do instead of pretending to read Instagram captions for the seventeenth time today.

Tonight (right now, after dinner)

  1. Pour yourself a real cup of tea, no phone propped up next to it.
  2. Make bread. Watch it rise.
  3. Cook something without the recipe on your screen. Buy a cookbook for twenty dollars and use it.
  4. Sit in the sun for ten minutes if there is any going.
  5. Read one chapter of a book you have been meaning to get to.
  6. Watch the sun go down without filming it.
  7. Light a candle, for no reason.
  8. Put on an album the whole way through, no skipping.
  9. Make a soft drink from scratch. Lemon, ice, soda water, a sprig of mint.
  10. Call your mum.

Tomorrow morning

  1. Make a coffee and drink the first half of it before you check your phone.
  2. Walk to the corner shop to get the paper.
  3. Open a window. Sit next to it for a few minutes.
  4. Stretch for five minutes with no app and no YouTube. Just stretching.
  5. Eat breakfast at the table instead of standing at the bench.
  6. Write a list, by hand, of three things you want to do today.
  7. Make the bed properly. Not a quick pull-up, the whole thing.

This weekend

  1. Buy flowers from the corner shop for yourself.
  2. Visit the library, take out a book at random.
  3. Spend an hour in a second-hand bookshop.
  4. Drive somewhere with no destination in mind, get a coffee, drive home.
  5. Bake a cake, eat a slice of it with your hands, do not photograph it.
  6. Have a picnic, even if it is on your balcony, even if it is small.
  7. Walk one suburb over and look around at houses you would not normally pass.
  8. Do a puzzle on the kitchen table.
  9. Have a Sunday afternoon with nothing scheduled at all.

Making things

  1. Press a single flower between the pages of a heavy book.
  2. Draw whatever is on your kitchen bench, badly, in a notebook.
  3. Try air-dry clay, make one wonky bowl.
  4. Bake a sourdough.
  5. Sew a button back onto a shirt that has been waiting.
  6. Knit one square that you might one day turn into something larger.

Real-world contact

  1. Write someone a letter on actual paper.
  2. Send a postcard from your own city.
  3. Make eye contact with someone at the coffee shop and ask how their morning is going.
  4. Visit your grandparents, or call them. Both count.
  5. Have one entirely phone-free dinner with whoever you live with.
  6. Sit next to a stranger on a park bench and do not put your headphones in.

For your nervous system

  1. Take a long hot bath with salts in it and the phone in another room.
  2. Make soup from scratch on a Sunday afternoon.
  3. Put the phone in another room from eight in the evening.
  4. Get into bed an hour earlier than you mean to.
  5. Lie on the grass somewhere and look at the sky for ten minutes.
  6. Read in bed instead of scrolling in bed.

The slightly braver ones

  1. Cancel a thing you said yes to but do not want to do.
  2. Tell a friend you love her, out loud, without making it weird.
  3. Sit, for one whole evening, with nothing planned and no phone, and see what your brain does when it has nowhere to hide.

How to actually use this list

Do not try to do them all. The pressure to "do the list" is exactly the gamified app-brain thinking we are trying to step out of, and you can spot it the moment your eyes glaze over and you start counting the ones you have done already.

Instead, pick one that catches your eye. Do it in the next twenty-four hours. Notice what it does to your shoulders. That is the whole assignment, and the list will still be here next week.

A fresh bouquet
A fresh bouquet

If you would like a small monthly nudge in this direction, we put one in the post for you every month. A real letter, real seeds, a real recipe, real things to make with your hands. Founding fifty for June, a handful left.

With love, The Connected au team