One Evening a Week Without My Phone: Notes From a Half-Arsed Digital Detox

The rule was simple, mainly because I wrote it myself and I'm not a demanding boss. Sunday evening, six o'clock until nine. Phone goes in the drawer of the sideboard, the one that sticks. No scrolling, no second screen, no “just checking the weather.” Three hours, once a week, doing something with my hands.

I want to be honest about my motivations here, because they weren't noble. It wasn't a wellness journey. It was that I'd noticed I was spending Sunday evenings in a strange, jumpy state — half-watching something, half-scrolling, and going to bed feeling like I'd had a bath in a car park. That was it. That was the whole reason.

This isn't a piece about quitting your phone. I didn't. It's a piece about three hours a week, which turns out to be the exact amount of time it takes to make something slightly rubbish and feel better about everything.

Week one: the mug that looked like a bin

I decided to start with drawing, because I had a pencil and a notebook already and I didn't want to spend money on a new personality.

I set the mug from my tea on the table and drew it. Reader, the ellipse was wrong. The handle was wrong. The proportions were wrong in a way that made it look less like a mug and more like a small wheelie bin with ideas above its station.

And then something unexpected happened, which is that I laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, at my own terrible drawing. I hadn't had that reaction to anything on my phone in about two years. I did three more mugs. They got marginally less bin-like. The whole thing took twenty-five minutes and I'd already lost interest, so I did the washing up and read a book and went to bed at half nine like a Victorian.

Verdict: suspiciously good.

Week two: kitchen-table printmaking

My second attempt was a potato. Not for any aesthetic reason — I'd seen a thing about it in an old magazine and I had a potato and a tube of green acrylic in the cupboard from a long-abandoned project.

I cut a rough leaf shape into it with a kitchen knife, which I do not recommend and which I am not endorsing, and stamped it across a sheet of A4 twenty-odd times in slightly wobbly rows. It looked like a tea towel. Not a nice tea towel. A tea towel from a holiday cottage in 2009.

But here's the thing: it was genuinely absorbing. Twenty minutes in, I realised I'd stopped narrating to myself, if that makes sense. There was no comment section happening in my head. Just the potato, the paper, and whether the next row needed a bit more paint.

Verdict: messy. Keeping it.

Week three: the one where it fell apart

Third Sunday, the whole thing collapsed. I got the pencil out at four minutes past six, drew half a chair, felt a wave of pure boredom, and sat there like a switched-off telly for an hour. Then I gave up, got the phone out of the drawer and fell down a hole about a TikToker renovating a narrowboat.

I want to include this because every article about switching off makes it sound like a smooth and gentle slope, and it really isn't. Some evenings your brain just wants the fizz. Mine did. I gave it the fizz.

What I did the following week was stupidly simple, and it's the best thing I learned: I left the materials out. Pencils, paper, the potato, all of it, stacked on the corner of the table, obvious and easy to reach. I stopped treating creativity like an appointment and started treating it like a thing that was already happening in the corner of the kitchen.

Verdict: failure is allowed. Keep the paper out.

Week four: the good one

This is the bit where I make printmaking sound profound. It wasn't. But I'd had a rough week at work, I lit the lamp at half five because it gets dark at four by November and I'm not made of stone, put the radio on, and spent two hours cutting lino.

And here's what I noticed: I'd stopped caring about the result. I wasn't making a print for anyone. There was no caption. There was nobody to be good for. The whole thing was for a wall in my own house, or perhaps for the recycling bin, and either way it was none of anyone's business.

That's the bit I think I'd been missing. Every creative thing I'd done for years had, in some small way, been aimed at somebody — a post, a reply, a mild bit of showing off. Sunday evening had somehow become the only place in my week where the stakes were absolutely zero.

If you want to try it

A few things I'd actually recommend, all of them unglamorous.

Put the phone in another room, not just face down. Face down is a negotiation. The sideboard drawer is a boundary.

Don't buy anything. Not in week one, not in week two. The point is the time, not the kit. If you already own a pencil, you're fully equipped.

Set a timer on an actual clock. Mine is the oven one. Three hours is long, and you'll want a signal that it's over.

Pick something with no finish line. No 30-day challenge, no journal with prompts about your inner child. Just a thing you do with your hands that looks rubbish at the end. Rubbish is fine.

Eat first. Absolute killer of a Sunday evening, getting hangry at a potato at seven o'clock.

Cottage pie is not a hobby. Worth checking whether your “creative evening” is quietly becoming your main meal planning session. Mine nearly did.

What three hours a week actually changed

Nothing dramatic. I didn't sleep noticeably better and I haven't become a morning person. What changed is smaller and harder to explain: Sunday evening no longer feels like the last gulp of a weekend before everything starts again. It feels like a proper bit of the week, with edges.

The mug-drawing is still bad. The lino print is on the kitchen wall, slightly crooked, and someone at a party said “ooh, is that a Barbara Hepworth?” which remains the funniest thing that has ever happened to me.

Three hours. Once a week. Phone in a drawer. I'd recommend it, and that's the most I'll ever say about it.