An Evening Without a Plan

What happens when you stop deciding what the evening is supposed to become

I am a planner. I like knowing where I am going, what time I need to be there and, ideally, where I am parking when I arrive. There are occasions, however, when I reach the evening and the last thing I want is another itinerary.

I do not want to decide that I am going to read between seven and eight, have a bath at eight fifteen and begin a carefully curated wind-down routine at nine. I have spent enough of the day knowing what happens next.

It is quite nice reaching a point where the answer is simply: I have no idea. That may be more useful than it sounds.

PLANNING STILL TAKES EFFORT

Planning is obviously useful. Without it, most of us would forget appointments, run out of food and discover that our passports had expired somewhere around the airport check-in desk.

It is still mental work.

Even ordinary planning involves looking ahead, comparing options, making choices and holding enough information in mind to decide what happens next. Recent research into cognitive fatigue suggests that after sustained mental effort, people can become less willing to choose options that demand still more cognitive effort.

That feels fairly recognisable by the end of a working day.

Asking me what I want for dinner at five o'clock can sometimes feel like an unnecessarily personal attack. Choosing between pasta and something involving a potato is hardly one of life's major decisions, but it has arrived behind dozens of others.

Which email needs answered first? Is this urgent? Do I deal with it now or later? What did I say I would remember? What do we need from the shop? What time does somebody need picked up? Have I replied to that message?

None of these decisions is especially dramatic on its own. Together, they can leave you with very little enthusiasm for creating an evening programme once you finally have some free time.

FREE TIME CAN BECOME VERY ORGANISED

We are surprisingly good at giving leisure time its own administration. There are reading targets, television watchlists, fitness plans, skincare routines, hobbies we intend to improve at and lists of films we really ought to have seen by now. We save recipes for weekends, books for holidays, restaurants for special occasions and programmes for when we have enough time to properly appreciate them.

Eventually, even having fun can acquire a backlog. I do this myself. I can turn things I genuinely want to do into a collection of things waiting for my attention, which is an impressive way of making leisure resemble work.

None of this means planning enjoyable things is a bad idea. Anticipating something can be part of the pleasure, and there are evenings when knowing exactly what I am going to do is enormously appealing. The problem begins when free time starts to feel as though it has to be used correctly.

You finally get an evening to yourself and immediately begin assessing the options. Should I read? Catch up with the programme I started? Do something useful while I have the chance? Start one of the hobbies I apparently own all the equipment for?

By the time you have identified the optimum use of the evening, watching absolute nonsense on television starts to look like a well-researched conclusion.

CONTROL IS NOT THE SAME AS HAVING A SCHEDULE

Research into recovery from work often describes four experiences that can help people recuperate during their time away from work: psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery and control. Control is an interesting one because it does not mean organising every hour. It means having some choice over how your free time is spent.

Those are very different things.

You can have an evening planned down to the minute and feel as though you are following instructions or spend several hours doing very little and feel completely in charge of your time.

The activity itself can change meaning depending on why you are doing it. Cooking something complicated because you fancy it feels different from cooking because everybody needs fed. Reading thirty pages because the book has pulled you in feels different from reading them because you decided that thirty pages a night is what disciplined people do.

Sometimes the nicest thing about an unplanned evening is simply that nothing has claimed it before you arrive.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU FANCY YET

Someone asks what you are doing tonight and saying “nothing” can sound vaguely apologetic, as though a better offer failed to materialise. Nothing can be excellent. It also does not have to remain nothing. An evening can take shape as you go along.

You can make dinner and decide afterwards whether you want to watch something. You can start a film and abandon it when you realise you are not remotely interested. You can read ten pages, wander into the kitchen, make toast for no obvious reason and find something completely different to do half an hour later.

I have lost an unreasonable amount of my life standing in kitchens doing nothing in particular. It seems that this forms part of my evening process.

Leaving time undecided gives you the chance to respond to the mood you are in rather than the mood you predicted several hours earlier.

SPONTANEITY CAN BE VERY BORING

The word spontaneous has been badly served by people who suddenly book flights to Barcelona. Most spontaneity is considerably less cinematic.

It can mean deciding at half past seven that you fancy a bath, noticing that the weather is nice and going out for a while, putting a documentary on because the subject sounds bizarre, making toast because dinner happened suspiciously early or getting into bed with a book despite having no intention of sleeping.

It might mean remembering something you wanted to look up and disappearing down a completely unnecessary historical rabbit hole.

This is how I ended up learning why people hid shoes inside the walls of houses, which was not how I expected that evening to develop but was considerably more interesting than anything I had planned. Small spontaneity is still spontaneity. It is simply allowing curiosity, appetite, energy or mood to have some influence over what happens next.

SOMETIMES THE EVENING FINDS ITS OWN PLAN

One of the useful things about leaving time open is that you rarely spend the entire evening staring at the wall waiting for inspiration. Something tends to catch your attention.

You notice the book beside you and pick it up. A programme somebody mentioned comes back to you. You decide to do your nails, sort through some photographs or look up one small thing online and emerge forty minutes later knowing far more about Victorian funeral customs than any reasonable person requires.

What has changed is not necessarily what you are doing. It is how you arrived there.

Instead of deciding in advance that the evening must contain reading, television, a hobby or something suitably restorative, you followed whatever held your interest when the time came.

OF COURSE, SOMETIMES A PLAN IS EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED

There is a flaw in any argument that suggests unplanned evenings are inherently better: for some people, deciding in advance is what removes the effort.

Knowing that dinner is sorted, a programme is waiting and nothing else is happening tonight can be a relief. A familiar routine can reduce the number of choices left to make, particularly after a demanding day. This is why I do not think the answer is to become militantly spontaneous.

The more useful distinction is whether your plans are helping you enjoy your time or supervising it.

A plan that makes the evening easier has done its job. A plan that leaves you feeling vaguely guilty because you have failed to relax according to schedule may have become another responsibility.

You are allowed to change it.

Free time is one of the few areas where changing your mind should require very little paperwork.

TRY NOT DECIDING YET

If your evenings usually arrive with their own agenda, try leaving a little part of one undecided.

Do whatever genuinely needs done, then resist the urge to immediately decide what should fill the remaining space. You do not have to sit silently contemplating your existence. You can simply wait until the free bit arrives and see what appeals then.

You may discover that you wanted television all along. You might pick up a book, go somewhere, start something, abandon something or spend twenty minutes looking at houses you have absolutely no intention of buying.

I have done the latter often enough to confirm that £1.8 million and a six-bedroom house in the Highlands is still not considered a sensible casual purchase.

The evening does not need to become anything impressive. For once, you can find out what happens next when you get there.