A List Between Friends

As we head into the weekend I’m reminded of one of my favorite things to do – get together with friends. Once a week my closest friends and I try to make time to get together for dinner and catch up. We’re all professionals in New York City with hectic schedules so some weeks are easier than others. But we always make an effort to meet up to enjoy some good conversation, delicious food and wine. (You guessed it – this is a Pinot Grigio crowd.)

We have a ritual every week, which I started, of making an agenda of all the topics we’d like to cover. I know it’s a bit neurotic but my friends have embraced my list making and it really works for us!

On the day we are going to meet up I send out an email with some of the things we need to update each other about. It could be about husbands, boyfriends, family, work, vacations, or even our favorite nail color! My friends add to the list and if it’s not on the agenda – it doesn’t get talked about. (OK sometimes it does — but generally speaking…it doesn’t.) We’ve also started experimenting with the Astrid app to share our lists.  So far it’s a very easy way to keep track of lists.

I try to give each agenda item a quirky and fun title. This is cute and also masks my obsessive compulsiveness.

For example:

“Brian’s Date” turns into “The Men of Brian’s Boudoir”

“Danielle’s Trip to Israel” becomes “Wisdom Seeking Tour”

“Jessica’s Landlord Troubles” is now “Haunted by the House of Horrors”

“Paula’s LASIK Surgery” can be “Magoo Be Gone!”

You get the picture! Here are my reasons why you should make an agenda the next time you get together with friends or family.

• Stay on Target: Especially when there’s wine involved – it’s easy to let the conversation wander and never get to the important stuff.
• Don’t Forget: How many times have you said “oh I forgot to tell you”? This won’t happen if you wrote it down. Just take a few minutes or have an ongoing list of things you need to tell your mother and you won’t leave it out next time.
• Everyone Likes Structure: It’s funny but since we’ve been using our agenda for our dinners we’ve really come to rely on it. It’s just one less thing that you need to think about and when your topic gets called out — you can hit the ground running! Or in our case – open another bottle of Pinot!