I run a face-to-face pen-and-paper RPG one night every other week for a group of friends. Some of them I've actually met through this campaign. We've been going for many years and when people ask how me make it work, my number one suggestion is the same as yours: pick a day of the week and stick to it.

Pick a cadence that is fast enough so that you don't forget what you did last time, but is also slow enough so that you have time for other things in your life and have time to look forward to it. It can be every week if that works for everyone, or every other week, or once a month. For us it's every other week.

One feature of having a fixed day is that it's possible for everyone to schedule other stuff around the activity. But the best part is that you don't have to spend a week coordinating peoples' schedules, having to decide if the player that "prefers" Monday gets to decide over the player who "prefers" Tuesday, and so on. At the start of every other week, it's already there in the calendar.

Also, since everyone in the group has jobs and kids now, people will miss sessions now and then. I've decided to play anyway, as long as we're at least two players plus the game master. If we were to wait for everyone to be available, we would always cancel, because someone is almost always away. We just pretend their characters are busy and decide at the start of next session what they did, or they float along as spectres with the group without interacting. If they hold quest items, we just give them to another character for a session, and so on. We make it easy to drop in and out.

I'm a player in another group that insists that everyone is present, and we have six-month gaps between sessions that are supposedly bi-weekly because there are always sick kids or deadlines at work for someone.