Standing Social Events
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
A scheduling system Nat Eliason built to see friends constantly without ever negotiating a calendar. The premise is that the bottleneck on adult friendship is not desire but coordination cost: every hangout requires a text thread, a week of back-and-forth and a compromise on time. Standing events remove the negotiation entirely by fixing a place and a time that repeats regardless of who confirms. Attendance becomes elastic — six people one week, twelve the next — and nobody has to organise anything. Because the slots are public knowledge inside the friend group, they also become broadcast targets for spontaneous invites, and open-door norms mean newcomers get absorbed automatically. Run at three or four slots a week, the system produces near-daily contact with most of it requiring zero effort.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Find the repeatable slots in your week
Identify times you are already free and predictable — an early weekday morning, Saturday coffee, Sunday errands. Build the event around an activity you would do anyway rather than a new obligation.
Pro tip Attaching it to something you already do means attendance costs you nothing even when nobody shows.
- 2
Fix an exact place and time and never move it
Pin the event to a specific venue and a specific hour — Thursday 7:45am at the same pool, 9am Saturday at the same coffee shop. The fixity is the whole mechanism; a floating event is just a group chat again.
Watch out Rescheduling to accommodate one person reintroduces the coordination cost you were eliminating.
- 3
Make attendance elastic and RSVP-free
Tell people it runs every week whether or not they come. No confirmations, no headcount. The value is that showing up guarantees seeing some friends, not particular friends.
Pro tip Design the activity so it works with six people or twelve — a pool, a market, a park.
- 4
Design it to survive life changes
Choose formats that absorb kids, newcomers and shifting schedules. Nat brought his newborn to the Thursday swim in a stroller by the pool with a snack, which is why the event survived four years.
Pro tip An event that breaks when your life changes was never a standing event.
Watch out Formats that require quiet, bookings or fixed seat counts will not survive.
- 5
Keep the door open to friends-of-friends
Let people bring whoever they like. New arrivals to a city get absorbed into the group without anyone running a recruitment process, and the group keeps regenerating as people move away.
- 6
Use the fixed spots as broadcast targets
Once everyone knows the usual venues, unplanned meet-ups become a single text — we're going here at this time today — with no negotiation required. Toss the invite out and see who shows.
Pro tip Text the group and a few individuals at once; someone almost always comes through.
- 7
Cap the total and protect family or alone time
Watch for the point where the system overshoots. Nat and his wife hit weeks with company every single night plus multiple weekend hangouts, and deliberately dialled back to roughly three social nights and two nights alone.
Pro tip Set the cap explicitly rather than letting saturation force a retreat.
Watch out Standing events are frictionless enough that they can quietly consume every evening.
In the wild
For roughly four years Nat and his wife met friends every Thursday at 7:45am at Barton Springs, a cold natural spring pool in downtown Austin. The group would tread water, talk, then move on to coffee and breakfast, finishing by 9am — about an hour and fifteen minutes that combined exercise, coffee and friends before the workday. Turnout fluctuated between six and twelve depending on the week, and nobody coordinated. When their first child was born they simply brought her, parked the stroller by the pool with a snack, and kept the event running unchanged.
→ Four years of near-continuous weekly contact with a rotating friend group, including through the arrival of a first child.
Beyond the swim, Nat describes a lattice of smaller standing slots: the farmers market at the same time every Sunday, where friends now show up at the same hour and either shop together or take the kids to the playground, and a coffee shop they reliably visit around 9am on Saturday. Because these venues and times are common knowledge in the friend group, they double as defaults for spontaneous plans. Between planned standing events and unplanned drop-ins, he estimates seeing friends four or five days a week, with more than half of that requiring no organising effort.
→ Contact with friends most days of the week, with over half of it requiring no planning at all.
Common mistakes
Negotiating each hangout by text
One-off scheduling means every meeting pays the full coordination cost — availability, day, time, place — which is exactly the friction that makes adult friendships decay.
Cancelling when turnout looks thin
The value comes from the guarantee that someone will be there if you show. Cancelling low-turnout weeks destroys the reliability that makes people show up at all.
Letting it eat every evening
Frictionless socialising scales fast; without a deliberate cap it crowds out family and alone time until you have to retreat from the system entirely.
From the transcript
“this is in my opinion the biggest hack for seeing your friends more often because everybody's busy”
“you always knew that if you showed up at that time you were going to see some friends”
“we said okay this is a little bit too much let's limit it to like three nights a week with friends and two nights just…”
From the episode
Chasing Success vs True Fulfilment - Nat Eliason
Nat Eliason