At least they’re learning time management.
Students on campuses across America are reportedly using Google Calendar to schedule their full days and weeks in color-coded blocks, including everything from when they eat lunch to casual hangouts with friends and even having sex.
Elijah Diallo was trying to figure out how to make a move on a cute girl in his theater group, talking it over with his friends one evening at the end of his freshman year at Williams College in Massachusetts.
Then, an idea struck: He sent the girl a calendar invite titled “Hook up?” for the following Friday night at 11:30 p.m.
“She responded with ‘yes,’ and then the rest is history,” Diallo told the Wall Street Journal.
“If I’m gonna make a move, I gotta make it funny at least,” he added. “Google Calendar has such a place in all of our collective psyches at Williams College that it felt like the perfect way to execute it.”
Diallo isn’t the only college student who has used Google Calendar to help his love life.
Yale student Asuka Koda told WSJ that a classmate asked her on a date on a busy day. She sent him a screenshot of her Google Calendar so he could schedule accordingly.
“He slotted himself in a very awkward time from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. and because it was on my GCal, I did go,” she said — though a second date never occurred.
The Zoomers are using the app for virtually everything. When Vanessa Long, a student at Cornell, first got a calendar invite that said “Come over to my dorm?” scheduled for 10 p.m., she was confused.
She later realized that it was a common thing on campus to schedule hanging out with your friends.
At Cornell, said Long, they use so-called “GCal” for everything: What time they go to sleep, what time they eat, if they’re going on a five-minute walk, if they want to grab lunch with you at the one dining hall on campus that you go to every day.”
“I thought I was the peak of being organized, and it turns out that I don’t even scratch the surface,” she said.
For many, it’s a relief to always know where they need to be and not risk forgetting something.
“There’s just so much going on all the time and so it’s nice to not have to think about it, and just have a point of reference of, ‘OK, this is what I’m doing next,’” Kaitlin Martin, a senior at Georgetown University, told the Journal.
Others, such as Stanford sophomore Vivek Yarlagedda, however, find the whole interaction problematic “in terms of how far we let our calendars dictate our lives.”
“Texting someone a Calendly link, like, ‘Let’s catch up,’ that’s kind of unnatural,” Yarlgedda said.
Read the full article here
