The two hour dinner

Hi,

It's Tobi and Daniel again.

Last August we tried to get a bigger group of friends together. Ten people who actually like each other and usually meet individually a couple of times a year. We hadn't all been in the same room since forever.

It took the better part of a month. The main WhatsApp thread, a lot of side conversations, three date changes because someone always couldn't, a restaurant suggestion chain that died after twelve messages, and one person who confirmed and then quietly dropped out the day before. By the time we sat down, the planning had taken longer than the dinner.

We thought we were just bad at this. So we went looking for evidence. Was this us being disorganized, or was the problem real?

It's real. Doodle measured it. In a study with 96 participants coordinating dinners and business meetings, organizing a private dinner with ten to fifteen people without a scheduling tool took one and a half to two hours of pure coordination time. Two hours just to plan one evening. Even with a tool, around 45 minutes.

That number made it click. We realized it isn't just us being bad at this. The problem is structural. Coordinating a group is a tax, and the tax grows with every person and every "are we still doing Friday?" message in between.

We kept noticing the same thing, in the data and in our own group chats. The cost doesn't come from the decision itself, it comes from the back and forth. Date, place, who's in, who's out, recheck, reconfirm. It scales badly. Four friends is annoying but doable. Ten can eat a week. And most of it is invisible work, carried by one person, usually the same person, usually the one who's already tired.

That last bit is the part nobody talks about. "We should hang out sometime" sounds light. The actual planning sits on one person's shoulders. Often, they just don't do it. And the dinner doesn't happen.

This is the bit Groopzy is built for. You say what you want, like "dinner with the wine group, sometime in the next two weeks, somewhere we all like". Groopzy does the back and forth. You get the calendar event. The two hours of coordination go away, because the coordination is the part you didn't actually want to do anyway.

We don't think this fixes everything about modern friendship. We're not that ambitious. But the two hour dinner... that one we can take off your plate.

If you want to help us test that, we're still adding beta users.

Cheers,

Tobi and Daniel

Source: Doodle, "New Study Reveals Surprising Insights on Scheduling Time" (n=96). doodle.com/en/resources/blog/study-reveals-time-spent-with-scheduling