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We’ve written about the importance of making and maintaining friendships in adulthood and the benefits of face-to-face interaction.<\/span><\/p>\n After reading one of these articles, maybe you tried to get your friends together to do something.<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps you threw out a text to them, and the resulting conversation went something like this:<\/span><\/p>\n You:<\/strong> Hey, that new pizza place just opened up. Let\u2019s get together for dinner there next week. What night would work for you guys?<\/span><\/p>\n Friend 1:<\/strong> I’m free Saturday night!<\/span><\/p>\n Friend 2:<\/strong> Reese has a basketball game that night. <\/span><\/p>\n You:<\/strong> What about Friday night?<\/span><\/p>\n Friend 2:<\/strong> I\u2019m going out for my and Cheryl\u2019s wedding anniversary that night. How about Thursday?<\/span><\/p>\n You:<\/strong> I\u2019ve got Boy Scouts that night. <\/span><\/p>\n Friend 1:<\/strong> Thursday wouldn’t work for me either. How about Wednesday?<\/span><\/p>\n Friend 2:<\/strong> I’ve got to work the late shift that night.<\/span><\/p>\n And on it went until the discussion devolved into a vague commitment to try to get together some other time. <\/span><\/p>\n Not only is it hard to corral your friends for a simple hang out, but if you belong to any civic or church groups, you’ve likely encountered a similar difficulty in getting people together. You plan an event for which hundreds of people might potentially attend, but only a handful show up. Folks just have all kinds of other conflicting events going on. <\/span><\/p>\n A lot of ink has been spilled on what’s causing the decline in in-person socialization in the West. Technologies like television and the internet have undoubtedly played a role. But an oft-overlooked factor is that in our modern, hyper-individualistic world, people no longer have schedules that sync up. When everyone is living in their own timeline, there are fewer shared areas that overlap, and getting together becomes increasingly difficult to do. <\/span><\/p>\n There’s a telling lesson from history on what happens to individuals, families, and society when there’s no longer a shared calendar or schedule: In 1929, the Soviet Union adopted a continuous workweek plan called <\/span>nepreryvka. <\/span><\/i>The plan aimed to increase the productivity of factories to speed up industrialization. <\/span><\/p>\n First, they rejiggered the calendar so that a week only had five days instead of seven. Next, workers were assigned to five different color groups. Each group was assigned a weekly work schedule where they’d work four days and have one day off. Which days were work days and which day was an off day differed between each group. On any given day, 80% of the population was at work, while 20% was at home.<\/span><\/p>\n While this arrangement allowed factories to run non-stop, it also had immediate social consequences. Friends, family members, and even husbands and wives were often separated into different color groups. Socializing became nearly impossible because everyone had different schedules. Clubs and church congregations began to atrophy, friends stopped seeing each other, and families became distant and stressed. From the point of view of the Soviet commissioners, this disruption of organic social life was only another benefit of <\/span>nepreryvka<\/span><\/i>: keeping people atomized made them easier to control. <\/span><\/p>\n By 1931, the Soviet Union gave up on <\/span>nepreryvka <\/span><\/i>because production began to slow down, likely due to a plunge in morale amongst rightfully resentful employees. But the social damage had been done. Those two years of schedule discoordination created tears in the fabric of society that took a very long time to mend.<\/span><\/p>\n In the modern West, we see a similar thing happening as happened during the Soviet <\/span>nepreryvka. <\/span><\/i>Instead of some giant bureaucracy jacking up everyone’s schedule from the top down in the name of collective efficiency, our social discoordination is coming from the bottom up, as individuals choose different schedules to make a living or pursue interests, often for the sake of personal efficiency.<\/span><\/p>\n Due to the changing nature of work, the traditional Monday to Friday, 9-5 job is no longer the norm. Many people not only work during the day but also in the evenings and\/or on weekends. <\/span><\/p>\n Not only does modern work create syncing problems, but the abundance of choices in leisure and extracurricular activities (for both children and adults) can keep people apart as well. Whereas a hundred years ago, maybe the only game in town on Wednesday night was a meeting at the Freemason lodge, now someone might be at a CrossFit class, movie, church youth group, or any number of their children\u2019s sports games. <\/span><\/p>\n Oliver Burkeman wrote about this issue in his book <\/span>Four Thousand Weeks<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/a> He pointed out that what usually keeps people from getting together with friends isn’t an outright lack of time, but the simple inability to sync up schedules. <\/span><\/p>\n This challenge of social discoordination is a stinker of a problem to solve. Here are some suggestions that have worked for me and that I’ve seen work in other people’s lives, which can at least help manage and mitigate the issue: <\/span><\/p>\n Accept that getting together with others is going to be hard. <\/b>The expectations you set for something play a primary role in how you experience its result. If you\u2019ve got it in your head that getting together with people should be fairly easy to do, when it isn\u2019t \u2014 which is very often the case \u2014 you\u2019ll end up feeling frustrated and resentful. Instead, accept the fact that any kind of socialization in the modern world will include friction and take effort and won\u2019t always work out. When it does work out, count it as a great win. When it doesn\u2019t, just shrug it off and try again some other time.<\/span><\/p>\n Create a set, recurring date for get-togethers. <\/b>One effective way to mitigate social discoordination is to create a shared schedule with your friends and family by setting a recurring date for get-togethers. <\/span><\/p>\n People often can\u2019t fit in an event with only a week\u2019s notice, but when an event is recurring, they can start planning their calendar around it. <\/span><\/p>\n A few years ago, I belonged to two different social groups<\/a> \u2014 one a scripture study group and the other a book club \u2014 that got together regularly by using this practice. With the latter group, we met the third Wednesday of every month at 6 p.m.; with the other, we got together every other Thursday at 8:30 p.m. We all agreed to the schedule and stuck to it and were able to plan the rest of our lives around it. It worked wonderfully for a couple of years. (Both eventually disbanded due to people moving. Sad!)<\/span><\/p>\n We’ve seen success with this tactic on The Strenuous Life<\/a>. Early on, we noticed that local chapters had trouble planning and organizing meet-ups because members couldn’t sync schedules. So we introduced the idea of “Strenuous Saturday\u201d and designated the third Saturday of every month as the official day for meet-ups. Groups don’t have to have their meet-ups on the third Saturday of the month, but setting that as the general norm certainly helped make events easier to plan and more frequent. <\/span><\/p>\n The recurring events you set don\u2019t have to be things that you do weekly or monthly. They can be annual traditions too. Maybe every year you throw a Memorial Day BBQ for your friends. They always know it\u2019s coming, and always know to save the spot on their calendar for it.<\/span><\/p>\n Try a 2-hour cocktail party on a Tuesday night. <\/b>People\u2019s weekends are pretty booked up. On Wednesdays, some people have church youth group. Thursday nights are a great night to attempt to get folks together \u2014 people are already transitioning into the weekend mindset but aren\u2019t as busy as they are on Fridays and Saturdays. But if you really want to plan an event where the preponderance of people will be available to attend, Tuesdays are where it\u2019s at. Tuesdays are dumb. Hardly anything goes on on a Tuesday, and a fun social event would be an accessible and welcome break from the norm. <\/span><\/p>\n You could plan any kind of get-together for a Tuesday, but to maximize the fun and effectiveness of the event, you can\u2019t go wrong with a \u201c2-hour cocktail party\u201d; Nick Gray goes into all the details of how to execute one in this episode of the podcast<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Soviet Nepreryvka<\/i>: A Case of Top-Down Social Discoordination<\/h2>\n
Western Hyper-Individualism: A Case of Bottom-Up Social Discoordination<\/h2>\n
How to Mitigate and Manage Social Discoordination<\/h2>\n