I schedule my friendships like I schedule my meetings | Hacker News Reader

I schedule my friendships like I schedule my meetings

critter.blog

59 pointsmcrittenden56 comments

That's a hard pass for me. Spontaneity is a big part of what makes friendships work for me. I don't need more scheduling stress in my life. I'm ok with leting old friendships water down and sometimes even wither away. Sometimes they can be picked up later, sometimes they are replaced by new connections. And that's fine by me.

The advice here is only to "try it if you’re sad about losing touch with people." If that's not you, no problem!

What age bracket do you find yourself in? DO you have children? There comes a time when spontaneity is unrealistic, and without planning all you will do is annoy your friend and their family by knocking on their door at 10 PM being spontaneous.

Spontaneity isn’t realistic outside your early 20s, when people start to get married and have children. You can't expect your friend to be be spontaneous if they're got to pick up their children from school.

I'm going to disagree with that. Spontaneity just changes a bit, it's not a boolean choice. You can spontaneously ask a friend to do something, and if they can't (because of kids or whatever) then you can schedule it. Is this less spontaneous than going over unannounced as a kid? A bit, yeah. But at least it still feels like fun. Scheduling friendships "like meetings" with "recurring events" is the polar opposite of spontaneous. That just feels like work.

Scheduling stuff with friends does not preclude also having spontaneity. It's just that for busy people spontaneity doesn't happen often enough to maintain a friendship.

Spontaneity doesn't happen unless you have lots of extra time lying around and most busy people don't have that.

In fact ironically I actually have to schedule blocks of unscheduled time for myself and schedule blocks of unscheduled time for time with my partner. Those blocks of time just mean that I don't have a specific plan and will do whatever I/we feel like doing when we get to that time. That allows for spontaneity in the context of me alone as well as in my relationship.

However, for friends that doesn't really work so well. It's not like if I have a block of unscheduled time that a friend is just going to magically knock on my door (I don't live in a college dorm, but if you do, that might work.) For friends we kind of need to agree on e.g. where to meet or what to do, so for friends it's usually scheduling scheduled time.

> It's just that for busy people spontaneity doesn't happen often enough to maintain a friendship.

Precisely, especially if you want to have multiple engaging friendships.

Hard agree. I started doing this with two or three close friends a few years ago, and started ramping it up to more friends some time last year.

Not everyone is willing to commit to monthly, but it's not as awkward as you might think. You could do one or two manually scheduled, and then after the meeting say "hey, want to make this a recurring get-together every [second thursday]?"

Pro-tip: you may have better luck arranging a hangout time immediately after the end of the workday (depending on the geography between you and them), with you both parting ways to eat a late supper afterwards. In my experience folks are more willing to commit to that schedule rather than give up their evening to meet up after supper.

My best friend just sent me a calendar invite for a ski day. We've been friends since we were four and have done everything that entails (cub scouts, sports, boy scouts, roommates, breakups, best-manning, etc.). I wouldn't ever want to lose touch with the guy, but even we schedule things like this. It's just part of lives getting more complicated and prioritizing things that matter.

I do like the experience. Instead of sending an email or text message you send an invite with all the details and location. If it suits the other person that is good or they make a suggestion for different time or place. It saves a lot of “let’s meet again. Oh let’s compare agendas.” And things not happening anymore.

I think the weird part for me isn't the shared calendar event, but the recurring thing. I'd have no issue if friends started sending me invites for things I agreed to, or with the expectation I might say yes or no..but a recurring thing makes it really awkward when you decide you don't feel like it that month, or want to end it altogether.

It's not awkward.

You just say you can't make it each time for 2-3 of them, then explain things are just busy and you don't want to keep cancelling so let's remove the recurring event until you've got the time again.

What's awkward about that? It's basically just the standard way to gracefully end anything recurring, whether it's with friends, a unnecessary business meeting, participation in a club, etc.

God, Covid has severely hurt my friendships. It's hard to even think about "schedules" or anything until the summer -- over a year with minimal friendship contacts.

Video calls don't work for me, and everything is closed in SF. It's hard to explain, but video calls just don't seem real to me. It does very little to energize me in my friendships. I don't know how people do it.

Half my friends have taken the opportunity to move away, so they're gone for good except for a few times a year that we travel to each other after Covid. The other half I'm desperately hoping things naturally get back to pre-covid friendship levels.

Video is worse than real. I'd rather make do with being alone than fight technology to try to get some human connection.

My girlfriend and I do this among ourselves and with our friends. I find it's not as calculated or insensitive as it might first appear. If it's not "on the calendar" then any surprises, efforts, or frustrations (friction) that arises is on that party. Really cuts down on those "I told you about this last month" arguments, and also from welching on friends or family events. Keeps us both honest and on the same page. Might not be high-speed, but certainly is low-drag as far as relationships go.

We do it as well. In addition all kids activities are in the shared calendar as well. So it is also easy to keep track of play dates, and sports and school activities. I haven’t gone as far as actually including other parents in these calendar items but we do (well did) for friends. Then we also include address details and such. This has saved us discussions on the exact time and place. “I thought it was next week!” or “where will we meet for pizza again?”

Recurring items with friends have proven tricky. The things that are regular enough are engrained so do not need a calendar item. Others get skipped or cancelled so very little use there.

I hear you with getting friends on board. From the luddites to the apathetic it's always a struggle getting everyone to engage with it, but as it is in all things I guess.

I don't know if it's that I'm getting old compared to the rest of Hacker News or if I have a different life but sending calendar invite to friends for events (lunch/dinner) seems fairly standard. A typical week I will probably have something scheduled most evenings, same for my friends. I wouldn't see most of them if we didn't plan for it.

I agree; was surprised that someone bothered to blog about it like it's a life hack, but there you go. I think there has been some loss in transition between the calendar we all had hanging on the fridge to doing the same in a more digital time.

This could be a gold mine of awkwardness, like if one side of the relationship now suggests a recurring invite twice a month and the other side was thinking, "once a year is plenty for me".

That sounds great. I’d much prefer adults have an honest conversation than go along with different views of the relationship.

Even in the OP's hypothetical that you're responding to, one of the participants lied! We all can surely think of reasons why someone would do that currently with the benefit of conversational ambiguity. And I see no evidence that any of those reasons would go away by making the request for "friendship time" or whatever explicit.

In fact, since narcissists clearly exist, adding that level of explicit request to casual conversations could easily make people more mendacious. Compare current blow-off of, "Yeah, narcissist, maybe we can get together for a beer if I ever get a break from my job," to the explicit, "Yes, narcissist, I agree to Zoom twice a month." Nobody's going to want to do the latter, but the narcissist will certainly make the request so an explicit lie is now required in return.

50/50 results... for contacts who are mostly work-related or arguably somewhere on the spectrum, the organised approach works and is appreciated; for the neuro-typical and/or more emotionally aware, it feels forced and not so genuine, so they prefer the feeling of me remembering they exist and wanting to talk to them.

Took years for my wife to understand why I like shared calendars. Now almost every activity that's coming up is in the calendar. Way easier for me to plan.

Scheduling meetings with friends is very common in the Netherlands as it's seen as an efficient use of everyone's time. I always met two friends on a Thursday for a meal and when I moved away we still video call each week at the same time.

Scheduling absolutely, with calendar/phone in hand and setting a time. My foreign friends in university laughed at this a lot, especially those from Eastern Europe and Greece. They would at most schedule to meet "next weekend" for beers not "Saturday at 15:30" like we Dutchies would write down and then all arrive exactly at or just before 15:30. They often agreed and then showed up an hour late claiming Romanian time :-) we got used to it quickly but still both sides made fun of it.

But I know very few people that set "formal" recurring meetings for just coffee or lunch like the author is suggesting.

Things around some kind of activity like tennis every Tuesday evening, or grandma babysits every Wednesday of course are very common. But not like the author of this post describes purely social things that are set so recurring.

For my friends and I it was a social event at the same time each week and all our partners knew we would be unavailable (with the obvious exceptions like illness, partners included). I used to meet another friend every other Tuesday afterwork too for a beer. My partner used to schedule meeting her friends at the same time so we were both out of the house. Often we met at a scheduled time and went home together. I liked the efficiency of it all.

I have found this technique especially helpful in the WFH context created by the pandemic.

I also found it helpful to create a pretext for the recurring meetings -- like a "book club" -- even if the week-to-week interactions don't actually end up following that structure.

Starting recently... Every Monday, I have one morning call and one afternoon call scheduled with a pal — eight calls / pals per month. I don't even try to do deep work on Mondays — I just do small clerical tasks and other ad hoc calls. I go into the rest of the work week socially sated, and disconnect for a few days of deep work (ideally). I explained when proposing these recurring calls that I'm trying this to get a handle on my anxiety (which random interrupting calls don't help). Not for everyone, but I'm excited about it.

Any tips for making brand new friends in your 30s? Seems impossible.

Take up an outdoor sport / fitness activity - and join a local club.

When I moved a few years ago, I became friends with a few folks from my new job. This is something I explicitly did not do in the past. Other friends have come from my college alumni club and pre-pandemic activities.

It is hard during the pandemic.

Got a hobby? I bet there's a club that meets semi-regularly. For example the original D&D generation is well past their 30's, so I'm sure you could find a group that meets every could weeks with lots of players in their 30's, at a local game shop. Similar for boardgames. Or if you have a hipster coffee shop nearby it might have a corkboard up with slightly less nerdy version of this stuff.

Church (genuine suggestion for anyone) We often have non Christians turning up to our church for one reason or another. A non Christian comes every week because he loves the people. You can find churches with members on either side of the political spectrum if you worry about that.

One thing I love is that (almost) wherever I am travelling in the world, I can just turn up to a church and feel welcomed.

My wife and I moved to a new city and went to church and were invited to a family home for dinner straight after the service. It's great to experience that in a city where you don't know a single person.

As an atheist (raised Catholic), I can recommend Unitarian Universalist congregations as generally very welcoming and friendly places. They're pretty common in the northeast US at least.

I joined a weekly game night. A lot of communities prior to pandemic) had weekly board game meets. In Sacramento, there is BoardGames and Brews weekly meetup. I'm sure similar kinds of things exist elsewhere.

You make friends by being places where other people are and having something in common you can talk to them about.

Pick up a hobby where you interact with other people. I ride mountain bikes, but there are lots of options. Look for clubs which might interest you. Or go back to school part time.

All of this is near impossible in COVID times. Get vaccinated, wait until group meet ups are common again.

Join local interest groups. Even if they're only online. Creative hobbies, foods, sports, religious/philanthropic groups.

Be proactive, even/especially if you're an introvert and it feels awkwardly forward. Most extroverts have already formed their fill of friendships by their 30s so you can't rely on them to initiate anymore. And people are more socially flexible/accepting than you may think, and welcoming of human interaction.

Give more leeway for who you consider "friend" material than you would in younger years. It's easier to find someone who's generally cool to hang out with but only has a couple interests in common, than someone who shares your exact set of interests but is easy to get along with. E.g., neighbors are a good place to start. Even if all you have to talk about is the neighborhood, if they're not a colossal asshole, they'd probably be a cool person to grab a bite to eat with once a month.

Don't plan for attachment. Expect that you might just grab lunch a couple times with someone, and they or you might move, have a kid, turn out to be a colossal asshole, etc., and the friendship drops in priority. If you get really invested early on, you'll get burnt out quickly by this.

Same advice applies to rekindling old friendships. Check back in with people you knew from college who were cool but you lost touch with. Maybe they live in the area and would like to catch up, and maybe they happen to still be a cool person and have a new interest which matches a new interest of yours.

Make a decision to be 'all in' on doing it and being genuinely interested in people.

That might mean finding venues where you're statistically likely to meet people who you will find interesting. However, don't judge a book by its cover. It'll definitely require putting yourself out there. If that worries you, it gets easier the more you do it. I can't stress enough that you're going to need to mentally "burn the boat" and have total commitment.

I know that lockdown is currently a hurdle, so maybe think about where you could go once things open up. Meetup.com is a great place to start.

Also consider using lockdown to be more interesting yourself. Learn something you've always wanted to learn. Try reading 10 books on one subject.

Hard to do it without an existing connection to be honest. I'm not sure if all the "join a hobby group", "play a sport" etc. responses actually work for people, but they definitely don't for me.

Plan a picnic or hike and hit up old Facebook/LinkedIn contacts who are living in the area, or ask existing friends to bring along their friends/coworkers.

You've gotten the standard responses already: Join a social club. Play a sport. Go to meetups. These responses are not wrong, per se, but they're one step divorced from the deceptively simple looking actual process of making new friends, which is this:

Find people to talk to, and talk to them often. The ones who you like talking to and like talking to you will end up your friends.

That's all there is to it, but like you already know it's harder than it looks, because the problem is finding like-minded people to talk to, and that's why you're getting a bunch of advice about hobbies. Turns out that people who like certain hobbies tend to enjoy talking about them with other people who enjoy those hobbies. It's a proxy for an easy conversation.

Those who find it harder to have conversations with strangers will find it harder to make friends, so try to teach yourself that skill, because at some point it's all down to being a numbers game.

Have you tried making enemies instead? Then you can befriend their enemies.

I do the same, but not with fixed schedules in a calendar, but slightly randomized reminders with my iOS app.

Calendar events are simple, but I like that I can snooze in my app or reach out spontaneously. It's more flexible. But before I lose touch I will get that reminder.

https://apps.apple.com/app/us/id1481868897

I have tested this also. I have found Calendar reminders drive “conversion” or increased likelihood of attendance by both parties.

Just like work meetings.

I think this could work for me. I often feel stress around knowing I should catch up with someone, and then more people get added to that list, and piles up and up. Sometimes I think I put off socialising because there are too many people that I "should" see.I'm going to try something more regular like this and see if it helps.

I know somebody who did this (not only to keep in touch with me but also other friends) and it backfired pretty quickly.

It came off as being cold and didn't feel totally genuine. It didn't seem like this friend actually wanted to talk; more that they were being told (by their calendar) that they had to talk.

I only added an event monthly: "talk to a random friend". It's a nice experiment so far, I use it mostly to talk with friends from my home country I guess, that otherwise I wouldn't talk to

180 words and 25 of them are backlinks to other articles on his own blog. I really don't like this type of short content on HN.

I feel like this is just an exercise in creating stasis in your life.

Friends will arrive; friends will disappear.

Your mom isn't changing any time soon.

Stasis is ok with some things. Use this to encourage existing friendships/ relationships you feel worth preserving. Do other things to meet new people and make new friends.

Personally, I think that meeting people has gotten a lot harder during COVID. For support networks, stasis is a good thing.

Most of my friendships are with people I ride with regularly. Many of them on weekly rides, others I just bump into at a monthly social meeting our riding club does.

I guess when you are very active in a hobby that ends up where most of your friends are.

We also did a monthly game night, since my wife has been vaccinated along with several of our friends, we're likely to reboot that very soon.

My long winded way of saying that this is a great idea

Why is this downvoted? It’s no more or less extreme than any other comment above it

LOL. Don't know, HN users are weird. I've ceased worrying about it.

I don’t lose sleep over it haha, but it’s still annoying.

HN is one of the few communities that isn’t just a constant stream of zero effort content, and the discussion is more often than not both productive and insanely helpful.

But it’s certainly not perfect. There is group think, downvote/flag abuse, abusive comments (piped through a thesaurus is all) etc.

But yeah at the end of the day it’s as easy as closing the tab to get it out of my life :p

I implemented this by accident with tabletop RPGs

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