Screens are useful, entertaining and almost impossible to avoid. Many of us spend the working day looking at a computer, use our phones during breaks and then finish the evening by moving to a slightly larger screen.
There is nothing wrong with watching a good film or playing a video game, but sometimes it is refreshing to spend a few hours doing something that doesn't involve scrolling, streaming or notifications.
The difficulty is deciding what to do instead. “Spend less time on your phone” is a goal, not an activity, so it helps to have something concrete ready before the screen goes away.
Whether you're spending the evening alone, with your partner or with friends, here are 20 screen-free activities for adults that are actually enjoyable.
1. Solve a Printed Murder Mystery
Turn your dining table into an investigation room.
A murder mystery gives you a fictional case containing material such as police reports, suspect interviews, photographs, messages, maps and other evidence. Your job is to examine everything, identify connections and determine what happened.
The format works particularly well as a screen-free activity because the case material can be printed beforehand. Once the investigation begins, you can spread the documents across the table, take notes and discuss theories without constantly reaching for a device.
You can solve a case alone, investigate with your partner or invite a few friends and work through the evidence together.
The games from Ink & Clues are delivered digitally but can be printed at home, allowing the investigation itself to be played with paper and pen.
2. Cook Something From Scratch
Choose something you would normally buy ready-made and learn how to make it yourself.
Fresh pasta, bread, pizza dough, dumplings or an elaborate dessert can turn dinner into the main activity rather than something you rush through before the evening begins.
If you're cooking with someone else, divide the work between you. One person can prepare ingredients while another handles a different part of the recipe.
Print the recipe beforehand if you want to keep the evening genuinely screen-free rather than checking your phone every forty seconds with flour-covered hands.
3. Start a Jigsaw Puzzle
A jigsaw puzzle gives your hands and attention something to do without requiring constant concentration.
Choose a size that fits the amount of commitment you're willing to make. A 500-piece puzzle might occupy an evening, while something considerably larger can become a project you return to over several days.
Puzzles are also surprisingly social. Two or three people can work on different sections while talking without needing to focus on the same thing every second.
Just consider the location carefully before starting. Your dining table may be unavailable for longer than expected.
4. Play Cards
A deck of cards provides an impressive number of activities for something that fits in your pocket.
Choose a familiar game or learn something new before putting the screens away. Depending on the game, cards can work for two people, a small group or even solo play.
You can also organise a small tournament and keep score across several different games.
Unlike many forms of entertainment, cards require almost no setup and can easily fill anything from twenty minutes to an entire evening.
5. Read a Physical Book
Reading is one of the most obvious screen-free activities, but it is also one of the easiest to interrupt with a phone.
Choose a physical book, make something to drink and put your devices somewhere that requires an intentional decision to retrieve them.
If you're spending the evening with your partner, you don't necessarily need to read the same thing. Sitting in the same room with separate books can still feel like spending time together.
Give yourself an hour without checking anything else and see how much easier it becomes to get absorbed in the story.
6. Have a Blind Tasting
Choose several versions of the same food or drink and hide the packaging.
Chocolate, cheese, coffee, tea, crisps, soft drinks and sweets are all easy options. Number each sample and try to identify the flavour, brand or price.
With friends, turn it into a competition. With a partner, rank everything independently and compare your results afterwards.
A blind tasting naturally creates conversation because everyone wants to explain why their completely unsupported guess is definitely correct.
7. Paint or Draw
You don't need to be good at art for this to be enjoyable.
Choose something to paint or draw and give yourself a fixed amount of time. You could work from an object in the room, copy a photograph you printed beforehand or simply create something from imagination.
With friends, everyone can attempt the same subject and compare the results afterwards.
The goal doesn't need to be creating something worth framing. The process itself gives you something absorbing to do for an hour or two.
8. Write a Letter
Writing an actual letter feels surprisingly different from sending a message.
Choose someone you haven't spoken to for a while, write about what has been happening and send it through the post.
You could also write letters to family members, your partner or your future self.
Unlike a quick message, a physical letter encourages you to slow down and think about what you actually want to say. The recipient also gets something considerably more memorable than another notification.
9. Have a Board Game Night
Choose one or two games and make them the main event rather than something you might play if nobody finds a film.
Cooperative games are useful if you don't enjoy direct competition, while strategy, party and deduction games can create very different types of evenings.
If you're inviting people who don't regularly play board games, choose something relatively easy to explain.
Nobody's screen-free evening should begin with a forty-five-minute lecture about resource management.
10. Make Something With Your Hands
Choose a physical project that produces a tangible result.
Knitting, embroidery, model building, clay, woodworking, scrapbooking and simple DIY projects are all possibilities depending on your interests and what you already have at home.
You don't need to finish the project in one evening. Having something you can return to makes it easier to choose a screen-free activity next time as well.
This type of activity also works well while talking with someone because your hands are occupied without requiring your full attention every second.
11. Do a Crossword or Puzzle Book
Buy or print a collection of crosswords, sudoku, logic puzzles or other brain teasers.
Work through them alone or solve them collaboratively with someone else.
Puzzle books are particularly useful when you want a screen-free activity without committing to an entire evening. You can solve one puzzle in fifteen minutes or continue for several hours.
They also remove the temptation to “quickly check” the answer online. If you're stuck, you're stuck.
Sometimes that's part of the fun.
12. Go Through Old Photographs
Bring out physical photo albums, boxes of old photographs or pictures you've previously printed.
With family or old friends, photographs naturally lead to stories about places and events you may not have discussed for years.
Ask about people you don't recognise or moments you were too young to remember.
If you have loose photographs, use the evening to organise them into an album rather than returning them to the same box where they've lived since 2004.
13. Have a No-Phones Dinner
Put the phones somewhere away from the table and make dinner the activity.
Cook something that takes a little longer than usual, set the table properly and allow the meal to take as long as it takes.
If you're with a partner or friends, the absence of phones changes the rhythm of the conversation surprisingly quickly.
You don't need conversation cards or elaborate rules. The point is simply to remove the easiest distraction and give the people at the table your full attention.
14. Build Something
Give yourself a simple construction challenge.
Build a model, assemble something for the house, create a birdhouse, make a piece of decoration or invent something from materials you already have.
With friends, you can turn this into a competition by giving everyone the same materials and objective.
Building something provides a clear goal and a visible result, which makes it particularly satisfying when you're trying to replace passive entertainment with something more active.
15. Try Journaling
Take a notebook and write without worrying about whether anybody else will ever read it.
You can reflect on the past week, write about something you're trying to decide, make plans or simply record things you don't want to forget.
If staring at a blank page feels uncomfortable, give yourself a specific prompt: What was the best thing that happened this month? What would you like to change? What are you looking forward to?
Ten minutes can be enough. Journaling doesn't need to become a major daily ritual to be useful as a quiet screen-free activity.
16. Create an At-Home Spa Evening
If you've already spent the day working, your screen-free activity doesn't need to become another project.
Take a bath or long shower, use a face mask, make tea and put on some music without keeping your phone beside you.
With a partner, you can combine the evening with dinner or give each other massages.
The goal is simply to create a few hours where you aren't constantly available to messages, emails and notifications.
Sometimes doing less is the activity.
17. Have a Conversation Night
Set aside an evening where the main plan is simply to talk.
This can sound slightly artificial, so give the conversation some structure if necessary. Write questions on pieces of paper beforehand or use a physical conversation card game.
Mix light questions with things you rarely discuss in everyday life: future plans, childhood memories, places you'd like to visit or things you'd like to learn.
This can work with a partner, close friends or family.
The point isn't to turn dinner into therapy. It's to create room for conversations that don't always happen while everyone is simultaneously looking at their phones.
18. Organise a Mini Tournament
Create several simple events and keep score throughout the evening.
Cards, paper airplanes, memory tests, drawing challenges, darts, cup stacking or trivia can all become tournament rounds.
With four or more people, divide into teams. With two people, compete directly.
The activities themselves don't need to be sophisticated. Giving them points and an overall winner is usually enough to make adults take something completely ridiculous far more seriously than expected.
19. Plan Something Using Paper
Planning doesn't have to involve opening seventeen browser tabs.
Take a notebook and plan a future trip, home project, party, garden, personal goal or something else you're looking forward to.
Write down what you already know, create lists and sketch out possibilities.
You may eventually need a screen to check prices or book things, but you don't need to do every part of the process at once.
Separating the thinking from the searching can actually make it easier to decide what you want.
20. Create a Screen-Free Mystery Night
Instead of simply deciding not to use screens, build the evening around an activity that makes you forget about them.
Print a mystery beforehand, clear the table, prepare snacks and put the phones away. Then spend the next couple of hours examining evidence, taking notes and arguing about which suspect is lying.
A good mystery gives the evening a clear objective, so avoiding your phone doesn't feel like a test of willpower.
You're simply busy doing something else.
Why Try a Screen-Free Evening?
The purpose of a screen-free evening doesn't have to be a complete digital detox.
Screens are part of everyday life, and avoiding them entirely isn't particularly realistic for most people. The more useful goal can simply be to create periods where they aren't the automatic answer to every empty moment.
When you already know what you're going to do, putting the phone away becomes much easier. You're not sitting in a room trying not to use technology; you're cooking, reading, solving something or talking to another person.
That distinction matters because replacing a habit is usually more enjoyable than simply removing it.
Screen-Free Activities for Couples
For couples, the best screen-free activities usually create some form of interaction.
Cooking together, playing cards, solving a puzzle, blind tasting or investigating a murder mystery all give you something to discuss and work on together.
You don't necessarily need to spend the entire evening talking. Reading separate books, working on creative projects or doing a jigsaw puzzle can still create a shared evening without requiring constant conversation.
The important part is intentionality. There is a difference between choosing to spend a quiet evening together and sitting beside each other while independently scrolling.
Screen-Free Activities With Friends
When friends come over, choose something where several people can participate at once.
A quiz, board game, tasting, card tournament or murder mystery gives the group a shared focus while leaving plenty of room for conversation.
You also don't need several activities. One substantial game or investigation combined with food and time to talk can easily fill the evening.
If phones are needed for practical reasons, you don't need to enforce some dramatic device ban. Simply keeping them away from the table unless they're actually needed can change the atmosphere considerably.
Screen-Free Activities to Do Alone
A screen-free evening alone can be particularly useful if your normal default is television, gaming or scrolling.
Read a physical book, start a creative project, journal, cook something complicated, build something or work through a puzzle book.
You can also solve an investigation-style mystery alone. Without other players, you make every connection yourself and can spend as long as you want examining individual pieces of evidence.
Choose something with enough structure to hold your attention. If the alternative to your phone is simply “sit quietly and resist using your phone”, the phone has an extremely unfair advantage.
How to Spend Less Time on Your Phone at Home
Trying to rely entirely on self-control makes the process unnecessarily difficult.
Decide what you're doing first. Get the book, game, puzzle or ingredients ready and then put the phone somewhere inconvenient enough that reaching for it becomes a conscious choice.
If you're using a downloadable activity, print the material before the evening begins. If you're cooking, print or write down the recipe. If you're playing music, choose what you want beforehand rather than repeatedly returning to the device.
You don't need to create complicated rules or count every minute of screen time. Start with an hour or an evening and see whether you actually enjoy it.
The aim isn't to prove that you can live without technology. It's to rediscover activities that don't need it.
Print the Case and Put the Phones Away
If you're looking for a screen-free activity with a clear objective, an investigation-style murder mystery works particularly well because the digital part can happen before you begin.
The murder mystery games from Ink & Clues are delivered as PDFs, so you can print the case material and then investigate using physical documents around the table. You'll examine police reports, interviews, photographs and other evidence while trying to determine what happened.
The regular cases are designed for 1–6 players and generally take around 1.5–2 hours, making them suitable for a solo evening, date night or small group of friends.
If you'd like enough cases for several future screen-free evenings, the Complete Game Bundle contains multiple investigations plus an exclusive bonus, with approximately 12–15 hours of total playtime.
A screen-free evening doesn't need to be about what you're giving up. Choose something interesting enough to do, and you may stop thinking about the screen altogether.
