24 Things to Do With Friends, Ranked by How Much Planning They Cost

In March 2018, Jeffrey Hall, a communication studies professor at the University of Kansas, published a paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships with a title that reads like a dare: How many hours does it take to make a friend? The University of Kansas press release summarized the answer as roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to reach “friend,” and more than 200 hours for a close friend. The work combined a survey of 355 adults who had recently moved with a follow-up of 112 first-year university students.

The number matters for one reason. Hours are the unit, and hours come from doing things together, so the question of what to do with your friends is really a question of how cheaply you can generate shared hours. The best plan is the one you will actually run again. This post ranks 24 of them by how much planning each costs, from “walk out the door” to “find a Saturday in three weeks.”

Those are round numbers from a press summary, not thresholds a friendship crosses on the dot. What carries over is the ingredient: time together, and coverage of the study says hours spent in leisure count for more than hours spent on work tasks. That is the filter used below.

Why rank by planning effort?

Because planning cost is the thing that kills friendships, not lack of affection. Robin Dunbar’s layered model of human social networks, in which people sort into rings of roughly 5, 15, 50 and 150 with closeness falling at each step, implies a maintenance problem. Every inner-ring friend needs recurring contact, and every recurring contact needs someone to organize it. If organizing costs 40 minutes of group-chat negotiation, it happens twice a year. If it costs one text, it happens monthly. If it costs nothing, it happens whenever two people are within walking distance of each other.

So the ranking below is not “best activity.” It is “best return per unit of coordination,” split into three tiers.

Tier 1: zero planning (plans 1 to 8)

These need no text, no reservation and no agenda. You do them with whoever is already there, or you announce them at the moment of doing.

1. Walk with a turnaround rule. Pick a landmark, walk to it, walk back. Twenty minutes of side-by-side talk is easier for many people than face-to-face conversation, and it ends itself.
2. Grocery-store tour. Each person picks one food the other has never tried. Cost: whatever two items cost.
3. The errand you were already doing. Return a package, buy a lamp, get the key copied. Invite someone. An errand has a built-in end.
4. Sunrise walk. Check the sunrise time, be at the corner 20 minutes before, walk until the sky changes. The start time is set by the sun, not by anyone’s preferences, which removes the negotiation entirely. Most of the cost is the alarm.
5. Cook whatever is in the fridge together. Two people, one pan, no shopping. Rules: nothing may be bought first.
6. Stoop or park-bench hour. Two coffees, one bench, no phones on the bench. It sounds like too little to count as a plan, which is why it works.
7. Doorstep swap. Bring the books, plants or clothes you no longer want; take what you like.
8. The 6:45 a.m. coffee-cart line. Show up where the early coffee line forms and stand in it together. Ten minutes of queue plus a drink is a complete meetup.

Tier 2: one text (plans 9 to 16)

Each of these needs a single message with a time and a place in it. The rule for the text is below, under the picking rule.

9. Early swim. Lap or open swim opens at 6 or 6:30 at many pools, and one message (“Saturday, 6:45, meet at the lockers”) is the entire coordination. Exercise counts as leisure time, and the hot shower afterward closes the plan.
10. Bakery-opening breakfast. Bakeries often open around 6 or 7 a.m. Show up at opening, when the first trays come out and the room is empty enough to talk. The warmest thing on the menu tends to be the first thing gone.
11. Farmers-market opening bell. Arrive at opening, before the crowd, and buy one thing each for a shared lunch.
12. Dawn trail hike. Choose a short loop of under two hours. Leaving at 6 a.m. beats the heat in summer and the parking lot all year.
13. Board-game night with a rotating host. The host provides the game and snacks; the rest bring a drink. Rotating who hosts is the whole trick.
14. Cook-along on video call. Same recipe, two kitchens, one call. This is the best remote option, because both people are doing a thing rather than watching each other talk.
15. Thrift-store challenge. Set a five-dollar budget each; pick an outfit or a gift for the other person.
16. Early-morning pickup game. Basketball, volleyball or pickleball on public courts before 8 a.m., when courts are usually empty and no reservation is needed.

Five of the plans in this tier (9, 10, 11, 12, 16) are early-morning entries, and they share a design: the early hour does the scheduling for you. Nobody’s Saturday evening is contested at 6:45 a.m., because most people are not defending that slot with anything.

Tier 3: needs a calendar (plans 17 to 24)

These cost real coordination. They are here because they also pay back more shared time per session.

17. Weekend day trip. Pick a town within two hours. Bring a playlist and decide the return time before leaving.
18. Recurring monthly dinner. Same night, same rotation, no renegotiation. The recurrence is what makes it cheap: you plan it once and then it is just Thursday.
19. Class together. Pottery, climbing, a language course. Eight weeks of the same hour is the closest thing to a friendship subscription.
20. Volunteer shift together. A food-bank or community-garden shift gives the pair a shared task plus a reason to talk in between.
21. Concert, game or show. Tickets force the calendar, which is the point. Tickets also break the “we should” loop.
22. Camping weekend. The highest hours-per-plan on the list, at roughly 36 hours of continuous contact for the price of one negotiation.
23. Sunrise summit or lake day. The calendar version of plan 4: a longer drive, a real destination, a 4:30 a.m. alarm, and pancakes after.
24. Trip. One coordinated flight, a week of hours. Save this for the inner five.

Comparison table

#	Plan	Tier	Cost	Best for	Early-morning version
1	Walk with turnaround	Zero	Free	Any friend	Yes
4	Sunrise walk	Zero	Free	Night-owl converts	Yes (native)
8	Coffee-cart line	Zero	Under $10	Neighbors	Yes (native)
9	Early swim	One text	Pool entry	Active friends	Yes (native)
10	Bakery opening	One text	$10-20	Talkers	Yes (native)
12	Dawn trail hike	One text	Free	Outdoorsy friends	Yes (native)
13	Board-game night	One text	Snacks	Groups of 4 to 6	No
16	Early pickup game	One text	Free	Competitive friends	Yes (native)
18	Monthly dinner	Calendar	$30-60	Inner ring	No
19	Class together	Calendar	Course fee	New friendships	Some
22	Camping weekend	Calendar	Varies	Inner five	Built in
24	Trip	Calendar	High	Inner five	Optional

How to pick: the rule

Use this one sentence: choose the lowest tier you can run this week, and use the next tier up only when you have already run the lower one with the same person twice.

That rule has three parts. First, run cheap and often, since Hall’s framing is about accumulated hours and cheap plans accumulate them fastest. Second, escalate by person, not by mood: a friend you have only walked with twice is not ready for a trip, and a friend you have known for ten years can be asked for a camping weekend directly. Third, attach a hard end time to everything. “Bakery at 7, done by 8” gets more yeses than “let’s grab breakfast,” and it makes the next invitation easy.

If a plan needs a text, use this template: what, when, where, when it ends. “Pool opens at 6:30 Saturday. Meet at the entrance at 6:25. I’m out by 8.” That message gets answered. “We should hang out sometime” does not.

What about the early-morning plans?

Eight of the plans above (4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 23) are built around a 6 to 8 a.m. start, and the walk, the hike-style day trip and the class can all be moved there too. The pattern is deliberate. Early plans are cheap in a specific way: the start time is set by the world (sunrise, opening hours, pool schedules) instead of by a group chat, the venue is usually empty, and the plan has a natural ceiling because everyone has a day to get to. There is also a quieter payoff. A friend who sees you up at 6:45, in the flesh, becomes a witness to your mornings, and a person who has watched you show up once tends to be one you can ask to show up again. Morning light exposure has its own science, and a sunrise walk quietly delivers it.

Not everyone gets there easily, and the night-owl versus morning-person split is real. But the fix is not to demand 5 a.m. from everyone; a 7 a.m. bakery is a reasonable ask for most schedules, and the 5 a.m. argument is not the one being made here.

This is also where the friends already in your alarm app become useful. An app like DontSnooze already has a group of friends who see your mornings, which makes them a ready-made group text for “sunrise walk Saturday, who is in.”

A sequence you can try this month

The tiers are only useful if you climb them in order, so here is a concrete start.

Week one: plan 1 or 6 with one person. Week two: plan 10 or 9 with the same person, one text. Week three: pick one plan from tier 3 and put it on the calendar for next month. That is three shared plans in three weeks at a cost of two text messages, and at Hall’s rough rates, a few hours together each time is a meaningful share of the way from casual friend to friend. If invitations are the part you tend to decline, the 30-day yes rule for friend invitations is a small experiment for the receiving end.

There is a limit to all of this. Cheap plans build hours with people you already like; they do not manufacture chemistry with people you do not. If three specific invitations get three declines, move that person one ring outward and spend the hours elsewhere.

The hours will not accumulate by wanting them to. They accumulate one 45-minute plan at a time, and the plan with the lowest planning cost is the one that gets repeated.

A ranked menu is also the fix for the choice-overload stall in the group chat, as laid out in the field guide to the plan that never gets picked.