I’m usually pretty flaky. I think most of us are. It’s just so dang hard to get off my couch and leave my cute dog to go outside in the cold rain to be social. My mom calls this the “lazy gene”. It’s plagued my brother and me since we were young. So in fear of spending my week-long winter vacation on the couch, I decided to fill my calendar up with friends and conversations. (I already finished Westworld and AO so there really wasn’t much left for me to watch.)
There’s a cool company called Calendly that I wanted to try for a while but didn’t have a use case until last week. Calendly let’s you create events and durations so people can easily book meetings on your calendar. I created 4 event types (breakfast, lunch, coffee, dinner) and duration’s for each event (60min, 90min, 30min, 90min) and shared it on Facebook and LinkedIn. It looked like this:
I’m taking all of next week off and want to catch up with old and new friends. If you want to talk life, business or dogs then let’s meetup. I’ve blocked off time on my calendar for breakfast, lunch, coffee and dinner for all of this coming week. Grab some time on my calendar and let’s share some ideas among friends.
There was some light traffic on the posts, some likes and what not but very few meetings actually scheduled. People liked the idea but didn’t want to open up. So I started calling anyone who liked my status (28 likes) out in a comment asking when we were getting together. That did the trick. My calendar started filling up. I posted this on Christmas Eve (Dec 24) and by the time the week started (Dec 26) I had 1 breakfast, 5 lunches and 3 coffees planned.
Later in the week, I was invited out to Monday Night Brewing because of my Facebook status to meet up with a small group of old high school buddies which turned into a full-blown high school reunion which turned into dinner and more drinks, landing another breakfast with a kid who cheated off me in middle school Spanish, now a hedge fund portfolio manager.
I don’t think I realized how special this week would turn out. I met with some really inspiring friends which really motivated me to do more with my life. (More on that in a separate post.) Only two meetings were canceled. One because of their work conflict and one because I had a conflict. Below are all the completed meals I had and with whom.
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Hungry yet? Let’s break bread together sometime soon!