Imagine you get a text from your friend telling you about a bar crawl happening this weekend. As you start to reply, letting her know that you’re looking forward to it, a Google Calendar invite pops up. It has a start time, end time, location and the word “Going?” followed by three possible answers: “Yes,” “Maybe” and “No.” It feels oddly formal, like a work meeting rather than a night out with friends. You accept the invite, but it makes you wonder when social plans started requiring this much coordination. When did casual events, like bar crawls, start requiring scheduling?
The truth is that by turning our social lives into color-coded Google Calendar blocks, we are unintentionally sucking the joy out of friendships. It’s time to lay off the over-planning and bring back the spontaneity that makes connections meaningful.
College life is already incredibly scheduled. Between going to classes, attending club meetings, trying to secure summer internships and working part-time jobs, our days are jam-packed with commitments. But the constant busyness isn’t just caused by circumstance; it’s a mindset we’ve normalized. Productivity culture has sunk its teeth into every part of our lives, convincing us that each minute of our day needs to be accounted for. Casual meet-ups have turned into calendar commitments because there’s so much pressure to optimize every moment. What happened to bumping into a friend on campus, grabbing an impromptu coffee or making last minute plans just because you’re free?
Think about how regularly we try to squeeze the most out of our free time. Instead of looking at their schedule and seeing one hour between classes, some students will break it down into a series of tasks: fifteen minutes to call their mom during the walk home, twenty minutes to make and eat lunch, ten minutes to check social media and fifteen minutes to catch up with a friend on the walk to back to campus. The problem is, when we plan everything to the minute, it stops feeling like free time and starts feeling more like a chore. While we may have technically maximized our one hour, we probably didn’t get the same enjoyment or connection as we would have if we had just spent the whole time grabbing coffee with our friend.
The influence of productivity culture goes beyond effective time management: It’s working its way into our personal relationships and overall happiness. Tools like Google Calendar, designed to make our lives more efficient, only reinforce this. Evidence shows that overplanning leisure time can reduce the amount of joy we get from it. According to a 2018 study published in the Current Opinion in Psychology, activities meant for relaxation and enjoyment, such as meeting friends for dinner or watching a movie, can start to feel like obligations when they are highly scheduled. Instead of offering a break from responsibilities, these planned social outings can contribute to burnout. When every coffee date or night out is planned down to the second, it’s easy to lose the fun that comes from unstructured time with friends.
Spontaneity fosters genuine connections. Think about some of your favorite college memories. Odds are many of them happened unplanned. For me, I think of the basketball game my friend and I got last-minute tickets to and when my roommates and I did an impromptu overnight trip to Chicago. These moments stand out because they weren’t penciled into a calendar.
Unfortunately, productivity culture leads us to prioritize being efficient over being present. In his article “I’m Done ‘Optimizing’ My Lifestyle,” Vince Mancini criticizes the modern obsession with being productive. Reflecting on his own experiences struggling with work-life balance, he advocates for the return of spontaneity as a way of fostering deeper connections. When everything is planned, friendships can start to feel transactional, more like scheduled exchanges of time rather than genuine interactions. People might feel pressure to make every hangout “worth it” or serve a specific purpose.
Our obsession with overplanning is rooted in deeper societal pressures, particularly the pressure to always be productive in a capitalist society. Being busy is almost a status symbol. People constantly talk about how packed their schedules are, as if having no free time means they’re doing something right. There’s a constant fear of falling behind, which makes us feel like there is no choice but to plan every minute of the day. At the same time our generation’s reliance on technology amplifies this behavior. Collectively, Americans check their smartphone eight billion times per day, about 46 times per person. Tools like GCal reinforce our dependency on technology to manage even the simplest aspects of our lives.
Productivity culture doesn’t just make us over plan, it also makes us feel guilty when we’re not productive enough. That mindset can lead us to look at unstructured time as “wasted” time. A report done by the American Psychological Association shows that excessive screen time and constraint scheduling are correlated with higher levels of stress. By reducing our reliance on digital tools for managing our social lives, we can also improve our mental well being.
To be clear, planning activities in advance isn’t inherently bad. For large groups, scheduling is often necessary to accommodate so many different schedules and make sure everyone can participate. If you have a 10-person friend group, Google Calendar can be valuable for organizing dinners and trips. The difficulty comes with finding a way to incorporate spontaneity without people feeling left out.
One solution could be to create shared “unscheduled time.” For example, designate Saturday afternoons as open hangout time where anyone free can join. If there’s not a specific activity planned, people will feel less left out if something comes up and they can’t make it. Another idea could be to prioritize smaller unstructured meet-ups alongside larger planned events. Getting lunch between classes with one or two friends requires less coordination and fosters deeper conversations. These types of hangouts don’t need to be formal events added to a calendar. A simple text saying something along the lines of “Hey. I’m free if you want to meet up” can be enough to make plans feel natural and low pressure.
Ultimately, reclaiming spontaneity means rethinking our relationship with time and technology. We don’t need to abandon Google Calendar entirely, particularly not for academic and professional purposes. Instead, we can use it more intentionally. By challenging productivity culture, we can create space for the unplanned moments that make our time meaningful. Leave gaps in your schedule to see what happens. Instead of spending time curating your Google Calendar to reflect every minute activity, embrace the off chance when you have an open afternoon.
Téa Santoro is an Opinion Analyst studying economics. She writes about how financial trends impact students’ experiences and can be reached at aristea@umich.edu.
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