Bring Back the Standing Plan

If you keep saying you need to get together but never actually do, maybe it’s time to stop scheduling every get-together from scratch.

There may be no phrase in adult friendship more optimistic than:

“We should get together soon.”

Everyone means it.

Then somebody says, “What about next Saturday?”

One person has a soccer tournament. Someone else is traveling. Somebody suggests Thursday. Thursday is terrible. Three people are waiting to check their calendars and forget the group text exists.

Six weeks later, you run into each other and say:

“We really need to get together.”

Perhaps the problem isn’t that we don’t want to see our friends.

Perhaps we are making the scheduling considerably harder than it needs to be.

Maybe it’s time to bring back the standing plan.

Stop starting from scratch

A standing plan is exactly what it sounds like.

First Friday coffee.

Second Thursday dinner.

Sunday morning walk.

Monthly book club.

Last Wednesday drinks.

You decide once—or mostly once—and then it repeats.

When my oldest child was little, I was part of a weekly playgroup. Every week, we’d meet at someone’s house or take the kids to a park.

And I loved it.

Yes, it gave the kids something to do. But it also gave us a regular place to talk about everything that comes with having little kids. We knew what was happening in each other’s lives because we actually saw each other often enough to know.

The group lasted for years.

The kids became close, too.

Nobody had to wake up every Monday and launch a new initiative called Perhaps We Should All See Each Other Again.

It was just part of our lives.

I’ve had looser versions since then—monthly coffee with friends, plans for regular dinner parties—and those haven’t always lasted.

The difference, I think, was structure.

The playgroup happened every week.

The other plans were more like, We should do this again next month.

Those are not quite the same thing.

The best standing plan may be the least impressive one

This is not the time to choose the plan that sounds best when you describe it.

Choose the one people can actually keep.

Very low lift

• Morning coffee
• A walk
• Lunch
• After-work drinks

A little more of an event

• Monthly dinner
• Sunday brunch
• Movie night
• Couples dinner

Built around something

• Book club
• Pickleball
• Trivia
• Hiking
• Knitting or craft night

I have done both a mom’s night out and morning coffee with friends.

I love the idea of a night out. And I think occasionally making your own plans—even if the rest of the household has to adjust a little—is perfectly reasonable.

But nights can also be complicated.

Dinner. Kids. Activities. Work. Spouses. Bedtimes. Whatever else happens to be going on.

Morning coffee was easier.

It didn’t interfere with nearly as many other people’s schedules, which meant there were simply fewer things that could derail it.

That’s worth paying attention to.

The best standing plan isn’t necessarily the most exciting one. It may be the one that’s easiest to keep.

You can always make it more exciting occasionally.

The point is that you actually see each other.

Pick a rhythm your actual lives can handle

Weekly worked beautifully for our playgroup.

That doesn’t mean weekly is the correct answer for everyone.

If everybody has jobs, children, partners, travel and twelve other things happening, a weekly dinner might turn friendship into a part-time job.

If weekly already sounds exhausting, please do not make it weekly.

Monthly is still regular.

Every other month is still regular.

Maybe it’s the first Sunday of every month during the school year and everybody admits defeat in December.

The goal isn’t frequency for frequency’s sake.

It’s creating enough regularity that getting together stops requiring a fresh planning campaign every single time.

Choose a frequency you’re reasonably confident you won’t resent.

You can always see each other more.

Put something real on the calendar

“Once a month” sounds like a plan.

It isn’t quite a plan yet.

The first Friday of every month is a plan.

The second Wednesday at 9:30 is a plan.

The last Sunday afternoon is a plan.

That doesn’t mean nobody can ever change it. Real life will continue doing what real life does.

But there is a big difference between occasionally moving an existing plan and beginning every month with:

Okay, everybody send the dates you’re free.

The whole point of a standing plan is that you have already done some of the deciding.

Don’t immediately give the work back to yourselves.

Somebody probably needs to keep it alive

This is the part I learned from the plans that didn’t last.

You kind of need someone to take the lead.

Not someone who becomes the unpaid social director of the friend group.

Not someone who hosts every time, makes every reservation, sends seventeen reminders and starts wondering why nobody appreciates her.

Just someone who owns the continuity.

“First Thursday next week. Who’s in?”

That may be the whole job.

You can rotate houses.

You can take turns choosing restaurants.

Someone else can make the reservation.

Everyone can buy her own coffee.

Owning the continuity does not have to mean owning all the work.

But if everybody is vaguely responsible for remembering that monthly coffee exists, there is a decent chance nobody will.

Please do not reschedule for every missing person

This may be the rule that keeps the whole thing alive.

The plan generally happens even when somebody can’t come.

Suppose six friends have first-Friday coffee.

This month, two can’t make it.

The remaining four have coffee.

Next month, maybe five make it.

Another month, three do.

That’s okay.

If every absence launches another attempt to find a date that works for all six people, congratulations: you have recreated the exact scheduling problem you were trying to solve.

Obviously there will be exceptions. If half the group is traveling or the date lands on a holiday, move it.

But perfect attendance shouldn’t be required for the plan to count.

Come when you can. Catch us next time when you can’t.

That makes the plan much easier to live with.

Don’t turn friendship into another obligation

There is a risk here.

Anything recurring can eventually start to feel like another box on the calendar.

That’s not the goal.

You aren’t trying to achieve a perfect attendance record.

You’re trying to make it easier to spend time with people you care about.

So if Thursday night dinner worked for two years and now everybody’s lives have changed, change Thursday night dinner.

If the elaborate monthly dinner party is becoming too much, turn it into pizza.

If nobody wants to read the books anymore but everyone still wants to come to book club, I suspect you have discovered that the books were not the load-bearing part of book club.

The structure serves the friendship.

The friendship does not serve the structure.

Make a little room for your own friendships

There is another reason these plans can be hard, especially during busy family years.

Your own friendships can become the thing that happens after everyone else’s needs have been accommodated.

Work is on the calendar.

Kids’ activities are on the calendar.

Appointments are on the calendar.

Family obligations are on the calendar.

Seeing a friend becomes something you’ll squeeze in if a mysteriously empty evening appears.

Sometimes it does.

Often it doesn’t.

If your friendships only ever get whatever time is left after everyone else’s calendar is settled, there may never be much time left.

Sometimes your coffee, dinner or night out gets to go on the calendar first, too.

That doesn’t mean you need to start going out every night while your family wonders whether you’ve taken up a second career in socializing.

It just means your relationships get to take up a little space in your actual life.

The real benefit isn’t the calendar

The thing I remember most about that old playgroup isn’t that we had solved a scheduling problem.

It’s that we knew each other.

We had enough ordinary time together to talk about what was happening with our kids and what everyone was going through.

Our children had enough ordinary time together to become close themselves.

That’s what repetition can do.

Not every get-together has to be memorable.

You don’t need a special occasion.

You don’t need a fabulous plan.

Sometimes relationships are built because it was Tuesday again and everybody showed up at the park.

So make one plan

Think about the people you keep saying you want to see.

You do not need to form a committee.

Text two or three people.

Don’t start a poll.

Don’t ask everyone to send every available Saturday between now and Christmas.

Pick something easy.

Pick a rhythm.

Pick a recurring spot on the calendar.

And send the text.

Something like:

We’ve been saying we need to do this more often. What if we just make first Friday coffee our thing? Come when you can, and if somebody can’t make it, we’ll catch them next time.

Then put it on the calendar.

You can adjust it later.

You can change it if it stops working.

You can make it more interesting when you feel like it.

But first, make seeing each other the normal thing instead of the thing you keep meaning to arrange.

Pick the people. Pick the plan. Put it on the calendar.

Then go see your friends.