Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
You’re relaxing at home when you get a text from a friend.
“Want to get together this weekend?” they ask.
You stare at the message for a minute trying to recall if you’ve already made plans. Unable to think anything you respond “Sure!” You’re actually pretty happy about this. You’ve been meaning to spend time with this friend for a while now and you’d much rather go out and do something than fall into your weekend ritual of Netflix and junk food.
Then it happens. Those six dreadful words pop up on the screen.
“What do you want to do?”
What do you mean ‘what do I want to do?’ you think. You’re the one that asked to get together. “Whatever you feel like doing” you respond, as if being open to suggestions will help the situation.
Rookie mistake.
“I’m good with anything.” They say.
You can feel the frustration begin to build but you’re committed to seeing this through. You’re not going to spend another weekend in. So you turn to Google and search for weekend events and activities. There’s no shortage of results so you pick a few that look alright and you forward them along.
Unfortunately, your pal has already seen the movie you suggested, doesn’t want to drive so far to the beach you proposed, and doesn’t really like fish so the seafood restaurant is out of the question.
Now the blood is starting to boil. You ask them to propose something. Buy you’re not feeling their suggestions either and counter with a few more things you found online. This dance continues for a while with intermittent stretches of silence while both of you hope the other forgot about making plans and you can just forget about the whole thing and get your weekend back.
Eventually, someone suggests something that seems good enough and everyone is too fatigued from this exercise in human relations to say no.
For one brief moment, you’re overcome with a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you’ll spend every weekend with friends. Then your phone vibrates and you look at your friends latest text.
“When do you want to meet?”
Suddenly catching up on House of Cards is starting to look really good.
And it’s not just you either. Your friend is likely wondering why they asked to hang out in the first place if it was going to be this much work.
It also doesn’t help you’ve planned to do something that was more a compromise than an activity both of you were looking forward to.
You settle on a time to meet and spend each day regretting the decision more and more.
You start looking for excuses. Am I running a fever? I really should clean this house. This project at work really needs to be done by Monday.
You’re about to send an excuse over when your friend’s message pops up.
“Can we take a rain check this weekend? I’m running a bit of a fever.”
“Aww, okay. Hope you feel better” you respond breathing a sigh of relief.
All of us have experienced some permutation of this. Sometimes as the instigator and sometimes on the other side. We begin with the best of intentions only to scramble for excuses later.
Why does this happen? How do we go from wanting to hang out to wanting to have nothing to do with each other?
It’s really the planning that kills it.
Figuring out what your options are, making a choice, and picking a time to meet up can all be taxing activities, and even worse when organizing with more than two people.
It’s not that we’re lazy or particularly anti-social. The root of the problem lies in how we go about organizing and making plans.
The problem is our technology.
Not that we use it, but in how we use it and what we use it for.
The problems don’t begin at initiation. We’re happy to receive a text from a friend and are excited at the opportunity to spend time with them. Where things start to unravel is when the question of what to do comes up.
Most of the time we don’t have a quick answer to this question. Whether it’s for an activity or place to eat, we usually don’t have a reserve of ideas on hand.
So what do you do? You probably head to a review site like Yelp, Foursquare, or TripAdvisor. This is the last thing you should be doing. There can be no doubt that sites like these have lots of information, but as we discussed in an earlier article, lots of information can take us further from our goal. You’re trying to decide on a place to go, and it’s hard to choose when you venture into an endless data warehouse like Yelp.
Wait, but aren’t sites (and apps) like these for finding new places?
They can be used for that, and the companies that operate them make more money when people use them to that end, but the foundation of these sites is built upon reviews. This means that their core competency lies in the ability to verify but not to suggest.
In another article, we investigated how trust is vital in decision making. The more wary we are of a source of information the less comfortable (and slower) we are in making a decision based on that information. We’re better off sourcing ideas from family, friends, co-workers, and trusted communities than strangers and major corporations.
We know when our buddy Tim tells us about a great pizza place he’s providing useful information in hopes that we like it in order to earn (or protect) his social currency with us. The suggestion is in the interest of preserving and strengthening our long-term relationship. When Yelp suggests a great pizza place we’re not really sure if it’s an ad, a fake review, or a genuinely good endorsement. We’ve all seen places rated way worse (or better) than we thought they deserved. How well does a site like Foursquare really know us? These thoughts might not be top of mind, but when you search these sites they are spinning around in your subconscious and make choosing much harder.
The problem is compounded also by the extensiveness of the available data. Yelp boasts the number of reviews and listings it has, but this sounds way better than it really is. When you’re already a bit hesitant on the suggestions and reviews you’re seeing the last thing you need is another suggestion to distract you.
Eventually, you have to make a call. But with so many options you’ll be left wondering if you made the right choice and feel pretty uninspired by the results you share with your friend.
This is where plans start to die.
You realize you’re more excited to submit an idea that doesn’t get rebuffed than to actually take action on that idea. That nagging feeling about your choice continues to build and it looks less and less interesting the closer you get to meeting up. Suddenly all those chores and mundane activities you were trying to avoid by going out are starting to look pretty good, at least, you know for sure what to expect with them.
Then one day you wake up and you realize you’re more annoyed than happy about seeing your friend. Better text that rain check.
Outside of an unavoidable emergency or unexpected illness, this is why we cancel on our friends.
It’s not fair to pin this all on review sites, it happens without them too. The larger problem is with planning and how unprepared we are to organize things in the short term.
What we need to do is treat organizing in the short term the same way to we treat it in the long term. And there is no better place to look for insight than travel planning.
Think back to the last time you went on a trip. You probably put some thought into it. You figured out what you needed to pack, found someone to feed your fish, and made sure you mailed your rent check. You also likely spent a great deal of time building a list of locations you wanted to visit and experiences you had to try at your destination. That list helped make the trip. You left excited to venture out and cross some new things off your bucket list.
But didn’t we just conclude planning, if anything, is demotivating? So what’s different here?
Time.
In both the situation with your friend and your trip you may go through the same channels to field ideas, but it is the pressure of time that distinguishes both experiences.
When we have the time to research, think about, and collect suggestions and ideas we feel better about them. In the case with our friend we’re trying to do all of this in a relatively short span of time compared to how we plan for travel. But it is that very time we take with travel plans which helps us make sense of all this information and quell the second guessing of our subconscious.
Okay, great. But who gets weeks or months to organize for a spur-of-the-moment meet up with a friend?
Nobody does, but that doesn’t mean you can’t prepare. And preparation may be your best shot to ensure you spend more time with those you care about and less time hiding from them.
So what can you do?
Find some time to sit down and write up a list (it doesn’t have to be long) of things you want to do. The more specific the better. The goal isn’t to get everything out (you won’t), but to get started. Think of it as your low-key bucket list. Things you want to do which could be accomplished in about a day at a moment’s notice. The list serve’s two purposes. First, it gives you a handy resource to pull suggestions from when you need them (no more off-the-cuff web searches), and secondly it provides a central place to collect great ideas you come across or get from your friends and family.
Now, whenever you get that unexpected text to meet up the pressure is off. You simply refer to your list of activities you’d be excited to check off and offer them up. And because of that excitement, because you’re no longer settling for what you could scrape together on short notice, you’ll find yourself looking forward to your future plans instead of dreading them.
This won’t guarantee your friend will like everything on your list, but this opens up another opportunity. This list doesn’t have to be just for you, bring in your friends and family to add things you’d all enjoy. Imagine always having an idea you and your friends can agree on when it comes to things to do.
With a list it’s possible.
So go out there. Get your list together and spend more time living your life.
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