By Tori Latham, The Atlantic, July 23, 2019.
Earlier this year, I set out to make scheduling time with my friends more seamless—or as I, perhaps grandiosely, termed it, “to revolutionize my friend group.” Ten of my friends and I already had a group-text-message thread, which we used as our main form of communication, but even though we talked all day every day, sending one another dumb, meta jokes we saw online about group chats and checking in about who’d be at trivia that night, we still often struggled to plan hangouts. With so many schedules to coordinate, we felt like any impromptu event was missing a handful of people, and seeing one another in a big group setting become more and more rare.
Staying true to form—a love of organization is one of my defining characteristics—I created a shared Google Calendar. Everyone could mark when they would be out of town or otherwise occupied (denoted by an “OOO,” workplace parlance for “out of office”), as well as put down “holds” in advance for larger events (dinners, birthday parties, weekend trips). To my relief, my friends bought into the idea with only a little cajoling. “Check the G-cal” and “Put it on the G-cal” have become common refrains during our hangouts (even if those statements are sometimes sarcastic and come with an eye roll).
As people get older, the opportunities to simply find oneself among friends without any prior planning grow more infrequent. Adulthood often makes people busy, overwhelmed, and sometimes burned-out by all the tasks they need to get done.The lengthy back-and-forths required to organize get-togethers that align with everyone’s schedule have even become subjects of parody in recent years. The shared calendar doesn’t eliminate these scheduling difficulties, but it creates a home base for making plans that keeps our text chain less cluttered with “So, when is everyone free for dinner?”–type messages.
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