When friendship means scheduling a dinner date four weeks out

Mikaela Shafer values spending time with her friends, and if that means booking a flea market day three months in advance, she considers it a small price to pay. For a while, Shafer, 38, and her friends found themselves in the throes of schedule coordination hell. One person would attempt to make plans on a particular day, but another couldn’t make it. Somebody else would offer a new date, but that one was no good either. They’d go back and forth a few more times until the group inevitably gave up, no plans on the horizon. Shafer wanted to see her friends, of course, but her grueling schedule as a small business owner, copywriter for a nonprofit, artist, and mother made it difficult to find the time. For her professional obligations, Shafer used the scheduling tool Calendly, which allows clients to directly book time on her calendar without the “When are you free?” discussion. Why couldn’t she do the same with her friends? So she made a second Calendly specifically for hangouts, linked to her respective work and personal calendars so she doesn’t double-book. She even modified the appointment page to include suggested hang activities, such as grabbing coffee or thrifting. When she’s in need of face time with a particular friend, or group of friends, Shafer sends them the link. Sometimes they’ll claim time on her calendar without her needing to ask. All they have to do is pick a date and a time. “My friends usually book things out a couple weeks in advance because they’re also really busy,” Shafer says. “We were trying to plan a vacation, and they booked the vacation time based on my calendar app — all the way in January.” Between the demands of work, family, and solo activities, Americans increasingly feel strapped for time. Many people live and die by their calendars, hardly finding a moment to breathe amid all the meetings, the commuting, the workouts, the playdates, the appointments, the scrolling, the self-care. Finding a few unclaimed hours for socializing can feel like a luxury, one that might need to be planned weeks or even months in advance. Like Shafer, these super-schedulers coordinate time with friends far into the future, either out of necessity or preference. For the friends on the other side, seeing a confidante once a quarter can feel like a slight, but for super-schedulers, it’s not personal; it’s time management. ‘I don’t have time’ The most common reason people tend to make appointments with friends months in advance is perhaps the most obvious: Everyone’s too busy. “That’s probably the No. 1 thing that clients cite to me as a barrier to spending time with friends,” says friendship coach Danielle Bayard Jackson, author of Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women’s Relationships, “I don’t have time.” While it can seem like there aren’t enough hours in a day, Americans have just as much free time as they did two decades ago: According to the American Time Use Survey, most Americans spent around five hours a day engaging in leisure activities in 2023 — the same amount as in 2003. What people choose to prioritize during that free time is another story. In 2023, Americans were largely kept occupied by watching television — nearly three hours’ worth, up just slightly from 2.5 hours in 2003. Americans are also spending more of their waking hours in solitude: Just 34 minutes of their precious free time was spent socializing, down from over 45 minutes a day two decades prior. Time spent with friends peaks at age 18 and slowly dwindles throughout a person’s 20s — and remains low for the rest of their lives. As people enter adulthood, their social lives and obligations gradually change. Work, of course, accounts for a considerable chunk of the day. Add in a romantic partner — one study found that entering into a relationship costs you two friends — and children, and your attention is fairly well spent. Whatever hours remain are inevitably overscheduled with little room for spontaneity or spur-of-the-moment plans. When most activities, especially fun ones, are carefully coordinated and tightly arranged, they feel more like work than leisure, research shows. None of this is necessarily lost on anyone. People aren’t satisfied with how often they see their friends and wish they could spend more time together. But without action, plans languish in the group chat. Stephen Antonini and his friends are at that age where almost every weekend is booked — with weddings, bachelor and bachelorette parties, trips back home, entertaining out-of-town guests — making planning a getaway nearly futile. In order to make their yearly trips happen, the 10-person group starts scheduling several months in advance. Antonini, a 25-year-old content creator, sends a few date options to the group chat and each person will “like” the message with the weekend they prefer. Advanced coordination is necessary for a crew of their size, Antonini says, taking into consideration each person’s varying jobs and vacation time. He wishes they could hang out as a unit more often, but he still sees most of his friends individually or in small group settings on a weekly basis. “There’s always one or two key people in that friend group that are out of town, or they already had pre-plans,” Antonini says. “It is good to have that plan of getting the whole group together and going to a different place because then you know that everyone’s going to be there. It’s going to be the weekend for the whole group to catch up and have a great time.” The allure of busyness — and the necessity of time spent alone While some take packed schedules as a necessary evil, others consider them a point of pride. Extreme busyness can be used as a status symbol or an excuse for why a friend can’t commit to plans. When work, family and self-care take priority, there can be little room for friendship. “It’s hard when you are proud of being busy,” Bayard Jackson says, since you might find it more difficult to slow down and make time for friendship. “Which some might see as frivolous in comparison to professional goals or the status of being busy,” Bayard Jackson notes. For years, Scott Steinhardt would drop everything for his friends, heading to the neighborhood bar at a moment’s notice to console one going through a breakup. When he realized his efforts weren’t reciprocated, his priorities shifted toward his career and romantic relationship. Now, the 38-year-old dedicates over 80 hours a week to his communications job and only has time to spend with one friend a week, usually on a Friday or Saturday. “It’s a different person each week,” Steinhardt says, which means months go by before specific friends circulate to the top of the roster again. One pal recently remarked about how he and Steinhardt only get together when they plan a month in advance — not to complain about the arrangement, Steinhardt says, but as a means of clarifying the bounds of their relationship. When he’s not working, Steinhart is recharging his social batteries or hanging out with his wife. “I value time by myself greatly,” he says. “The moment I was honest with myself about that is when I was happier.” Incorporating ample rest time into an overstuffed social schedule can prevent the most extroverted from burning themselves out, too. Shannon, a 31-year-old couples therapy intern in Philadelphia whose last name is being withheld so she can speak freely about her friendships, has a fairly regular weekly cadence with friends. Without it, her life would feel too hectic, she says. Mondays and Tuesdays are devoted to her internship; after class on Wednesdays, she hosts a virtual anime-watch night with long-distance friends; she’ll grab happy hour with one particular friend on Thursdays; Fridays and Saturdays are packed with brunches, drinks, dinners, concerts, hikes, movies. Sunday, finally, is for rest. All of these plans must be coordinated in advance, usually two to three weeks, Shannon says. When a friend recently asked if she was up for a same-day hang on a work night, she declined. “I need to give myself those boundaries; otherwise it gets out of hand,” Shannon says. “It’s the ADHD. I have to live by the calendar or else my life becomes very chaotic.” Most of Shannon’s friends understand her preference for super-scheduling, but her partner finds it baffling. “He asks me,” Shannon says, “why do we need to plan this so far ahead? Why can’t we just do this random thing tonight?” Making time for friends Can you even call someone a friend if you only see them a couple of times a year? Mismatched expectations for how often friends should hang out can make maintaining a relationship with a super-scheduler particularly fraught. You might begin to question whether a far-out plan is a sign a friend doesn’t want to see you at all. But the opposite could also be true. “Another person could argue that the fact that I’m doing the mental labor to figure out when we can get together is evidence of me trying to make it happen and trying to prioritize you,” Bayard Jackson says. Rather than attempt to cram more social obligations onto an already packed calendar, what may be effective is redefining what you consider a hangout. Happy hours and weekend trips aren’t the only occasions adults can hang out. Running errands, sitting on the sidelines of a Little League game, working out: These less exciting moments count, too. And every so often, when an hour or so seems to materialize out of nowhere, embrace spontaneity. On a recent Friday afternoon, Mikaela Shafer, the multi-hyphenate mom who uses Calendly to schedule friend hangs, had a few spare minutes in her day. So she decided to pop by a friend’s work to say hello. “It’s a good reminder for myself to take time out of my day to do nice things or to intentionally make time to see them,” she says. The gesture wasn’t entirely unplanned, though. She scheduled it three days in advance.

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When friendship means scheduling a dinner date four weeks out