Recently, I’ve noticed a split among my friends and acquaintances. On one side, hopping around like excitable bunnies, are what I’d call the super schedulers. Those who book dinners with friends six weeks in advance, who send out Google Calendar invites to lock in a picnic, and who already have a pint in the diary for a Tuesday in August. In many ways, they feel like they’re in step with the times. This is, after all, the age of hyperconnectivity. Then there are the people of old, the more spontaneous socialisers. In my mind, they are like felines stretched out in the sun. They prefer to make decisions on the fly and keep their diaries gleefully free of ink – certainly, their hackles will be raised if you try to organise a Sunday lunch too far in the future.
Vicky, a 31-year-old strategy director, falls into the former camp. She often finds she has plans for several weekends in advance when she looks in her diary – far from filling her with dread, it makes her happy. “I appreciate having something to look forward to each weekend, and I actually feel strange if I look at a weekend and there’s nothing planned. It’s too…” – she seems to audibly shudder – “I just like having at least one thing!”
On the other hand, 31-year-old business owner Ben loves to have “a whole weekend unencumbered” and admits he feels irritated when he looks at his diary and its pages are full. He would much rather not have minor plans booked ahead. “I understand the need for it,” he says, “but I personally much prefer to live my life by deciding on a given day or week what I fancy. There’s every chance that I won’t fancy a dinner I’ve got booked in three weeks because, when it comes around, I might have had a very busy week at work. Or if it’s lunch on a Sunday, that’s a disaster,” he laughs, “because I might want to go away for a whole weekend or do something that I am, as yet, unaware of, but then I can’t do it because I have to, well, eat food! With people!”
Time management and organisation can be more difficult for people who are neurodivergent or dyslexic, and Ben believes this could play into his reluctance to schedule lots of plans. “I’m quite good at focusing on a single thing, but I’m not great at having loads of little things,” he says. “I find that if I have something planned in the near future, then until that thing is over, it will take up a lot of my headspace and focus. Even though I have a diary, I’ll kind of be thinking every five minutes, ‘Oh s***. I have to do that thing on Thursday.’”
Overstuffed diaries are very much a symptom of modern life. As cultural anthropologist Dr Alex Gapud points out, “it’s a hell of a far cry from our early days as a species where we lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers, and communities were more intimate”. Hunter-gatherer bands would typically be made up of 30 or 40 people overall, essentially a few different families, he explains, whereas now, because of how connected we are through technology, our social circles are enormous in comparison. We can instantly talk to a friend who lives on the other side of the world, and make a plan to meet up when they’re next in town. Even 50 years ago, it would have taken a couple of weeks for us to communicate with friends abroad through handwritten letters.
These friendships with people in other countries, or even with someone on the other side of a city, take more nurturing, and crucially more intentionality, than friendships we might have had with someone living right next door. These days, says Gapud, we are more likely to “have our relationships that we choose with people we know from university or old jobs or school or growing up, whereas the local social fabric is something we almost ignore”.
Gapud, who lives in an old mining village near Leeds, also believes that closures of institutions such as pubs and churches in rural areas mean that incidental socialising is decreasing. “When you think back to this idea of a local social fabric, especially in mining towns, lots of people worked near each other or at the same place,” says Gapud. “Or they’d see each other at the pub on a Friday or Saturday, and at church on a Sunday. Those local social institutions created these routine opportunities for us to connect, to see each other, to socialise maybe a little bit more organically.” This fall in “third places” – spaces that are neither home nor work, but locations somewhere in-between, and often ones that are free to access – comes during the cost-of-living crisis and a loneliness epidemic, when people need them more than ever.
Paired with that, there have been major changes to our social fabric in recent years. “I’m thinking about my friends I have from university in America 20 years ago – at this point, our relationship is kind of inorganic,” he says. “We’re not in the same place any more, whereas we used to just be in the same place all the time. So we have to put some intentionality to our friendships, and therefore some structure.” And that’s where the diaries and scheduling come in.
However, beyond simply jotting down a date in the diary, many people in 2025 are sending Google Calendar invites to lock in social plans. This might be to do with how our professional lives are changing, with hybrid and remote work rising, and people using apps to organise a time to speak to colleagues rather than just popping over to chat to them in person. “It’s interesting to me how it seems like time-keeping practices that have become more pervasive at work during the pandemic are creeping their way a little bit more into our personal lives,” says Gapud.
For Vicky and Ben, living in a major city like London really exacerbates a full schedule. “I typically plan things for one to two weeks ahead, sometimes three, especially if I’m also trying to see a friend who’s also really busy,” says Vicky. “And one of the reasons for this is just living in a hustle-bustle city like London. I found this when I lived in New York too – everyone’s always out, having fun plans, going out on dates and seeing family, so people already have a lot of commitments.”
On a recent trip to the countryside, where he grew up, Ben noticed the contrast between his friends there and those in London. “I spent the weekend with my closest group of friends from home,” he says, “and they are absurd when it comes to not planning, to the extent that when we all turned up, we were saying, right, so what’s the plan?” There was no plan or hotel booked, so they used a bell tent and found a field to stay in. “There’s something about that that I find incredibly freeing. And that to me is the inverse of urban life, where everything is scheduled and quick and alarms go off in the morning, you’ve got to get up and get out and do a million things. That’s not to say I don’t like living in a city, but I do think there’s a big distinction.”
Time of life is also an important factor. Ben and Vicky are in their thirties, and find that their social groups are having children, getting married or helping ageing parents – all things that are a major time suck. “Double dates, if the couple has a baby, end up needing to be planned like two months in advance,” says Vicky. It’s also an age where people are more likely to have left the place they grew up for work opportunities elsewhere, so their lives are more diffused. “We’re spread out, and scheduling is as much about juggling time as it is about juggling energy,” says Gapud.
That slightly annoying expression “adulting” comes to mind. It’s completely different from when you and your friends were about 20, says Ben. “You just sort of got out of bed and thought about what you fancied doing that morning and everybody else was also 20 and didn’t really have any grown-up plans yet.”
So, what’s the solution? How do we make sure we see lots of friends, but also leave space to embrace uncertainty? “I read something where it was suggested that maybe the best way to do it, especially with certain friends you’re really close to, is to say, every second Friday is our day,” says Gapud. “It doesn’t have to be lunch. It could be a phone call. It could be the pub. But you know you’ve got a designated day with a little bit of room for spontaneity.”
Vicky finds it useful to keep her weekends as sacred time for close friends, and allocate time in the week to others. “If an acquaintance wants to meet up, I would suggest a weekday coffee or breakfast so I don’t have to commit to a Saturday morning with them. I hate when a friend reaches out like, can we hang out this weekend, and I can’t because I’m booked back to back. So I’m trying to be better at that.” She also made a New Year’s resolution to be more balanced this year, and protect time for last-minute opportunities (“I know it’s so ridiculous to have to plan for spontaneity,” she laughs).
Ben, too, does appreciate that having a diary full of lovely things to do is a great problem to have. “As I get older, I get better at thinking, you know what, I’m really lucky to have lots of nice plans,” he says. “So I try to lean into that way of thinking a bit more. I’m also in a relationship with somebody who lives for making plans, so there’s a bit of push and pull there.”
Super schedulers and spontaneous socialisers can live in harmony, then. There just has to be a bit of compromise. There is one thing that will never be acceptable to someone like Ben, though: sending a Google Calendar invite for, say, an evening at the pub. “That would be absurd!” he says. “There’s such a dissonance between the idea of somebody wanting to go for a pint, which is a relaxed and enjoyable experience, to somebody sending a Google Calendar invite. That’s just, well… it’s mind-boggling to me.”
