The eight p.m. rule

I have a small rule that I have kept, with reasonable consistency, for four years. After eight in the evening I do not look at screens. The laptop is closed. The phone is on the small tray by the front door. The television, which we rarely watch anyway, stays off. The evening from eight onward is screen-free.

I had thought, when I started, that this would be a discipline I had to maintain by effort. It is not. The rule has become a small architecture that the evening builds itself around, and the effort has been almost zero after the first few weeks.

What replaced the screens

Reading, mostly. I read for an hour or so most evenings now, in the green chair by the window, in a way that I had not done regularly for years before the rule. The reading was always available; the screen had been displacing it. With the screen unavailable, the reading happens by default.

Conversation. My partner and I talk more in the evenings than we used to. The talking is not deep or special; it is the small ordinary conversation of two people who live together and who, before the rule, used to spend the evening on separate devices on separate sides of the sofa. Now we are usually in the same room with no screens, and the conversation happens because the silence would otherwise have to.

Small tasks. The kind of tasks that I had been pushing to weekends because the evenings were full of small consumption. Sewing a button. Sorting through a drawer. Writing a letter to my grandmother. These have come back into the evening in a way that has surprised me.

What did not replace the screens

I had thought the screens would be replaced, at least partly, by anxiety. I had thought I would worry about emails I was missing. I have not. The emails are still there in the morning. The world has continued to work without my late-evening attention.

On the larger thing

The eight p.m. rule is the single environmental change that has done the most for the quiet of my evenings. It is not a meditation practice. It is not a contemplative discipline. It is a small piece of furniture rearrangement — the screens are put away — and the rest of the evening reshapes itself around the rearrangement.

If your evenings have been feeling fragmented and you have not been able to identify why, try this. Eight p.m. Phone in the other room. The first two weeks are slightly uncomfortable. After that the evenings start being evenings again.