As a working professional a couple of years out college, I’ve been noticing how interactions with my friends has changed since the beginning of college – and especially since graduation.

 In college, my social groups typically formed around groups with common meeting places -- freshman dorm, newspaper, church, “draw group” (essentially a group of friends that ‘draw’ into the same dorm).

Because there was a common space where everyone could hang out, everyone else felt comfortable just showing up (at least at designated times), and so there were always people to talk to. No-permission-required-meeting was a self-sustaining norm.

With jobs and schedules, we shift to a permission-required-meeting-situation – you don’t just show up at your friend’s house, we say “Hey, what’s a good time to meet up?”

This adds an additional barrier to meeting, and so that happen less often.

People usually realize this at some level, and employ a variety of ad-hoc strategies to counteract this. These are usually well-deployed in our professional lives, but in our personal lives, there are some complications, and usually room for improvement.

• Group meetings. There are 10 connections between five people, as opposed to one connection between two people. But generally – assuming people share fairly common schedules – it will take less than 10x initiative to get five people together as two

Disadvantage: Often most of our close friends don’t form groups. Only a small subset of mine does.  

• Non-face-to-face communication. Christmas cards are a time-honored way of doing this. E-mail, like mail, is a no-permission-required system. Every year, I send out a general Life Update email to my old and current friends and family. My friends and I more frequently email each other interesting links. When I read something cool online, I often think “who could I send this to?”

  Disadvantage: for most people, compared to face-to-face interaction, it’s not the same.

• Scheduling regular meetings: I live in CA and my girlfriend lives in NY, so for the last five months we have set aside 10am PST / 1pm EST to talk every weekday. For the last 8 months, I have met my friend Caleb* have weekly 1-to-2 hour meetings on Sunday mornings where we discuss how the last week went and make goals for the next week. We plan for every week, or day, and it happens 60-80% of the time.

 Disadvantage: The well-known “my schedule is too full to see you” is illuminated by analogy. In The Road to Serfdom (1944), economist FA Hayek discussed the politics of price and wage controls. These policies would shelter one particular group, he wrote, but at the risk of leaving everyone else out in the cold, and now slightly colder.[1]

Something similar happens with planning one’s schedule. Perhaps because I’m busy with the above and additional planned activities with my other friends, I don’t see my friend Christine* enough, and I rarely talk to my college friends Lina* and Maya* anymore

So Christine and I have decided to go running every Tuesday evening after work. Sure, I’ll be even more scheduled, and less likely to meet new, interesting people outside of my designated “meet new people” events.

But at least I’ll get some exercise.  

Commenters: really curious to hear additional tactics, improvements, or experiences!

*Names changed.