How NOT to RSVP

Sunday
me: you free Wed evening for volleyball?
Friend A: let me get back to you tomorrow.

Monday
Me: let me know about Wed!
*crickets*

Tuesday
Me: hey, how’s it looking for tomorrow?
Friend A: sorry, don’t think I’ll be able to…need to finish a lot of work by Thursday. Well, if somehow I get it done tonight I’ll let you know.

Wednesday
Me: how’s it looking?
Friend A: still got stuff to do so probably can’t make it.

So, 2 questions:

1. Who else has friends like this?
2. How likely do you think it is that I’ll invite Friend A again?

Bottom line — I don’t have time for this. If all of my friends responded this way I would never organize anything, which is why I appreciate (and almost exclusively invite) friends who can give a quality RSVP. In contrast, here’s another RSVP I got for the same invite:

Monday
Me: Gonna try for Wednesday volleyball if you’re around!
Friend B: Nice! Solid maybe.

Wednesday (11 am):
Friend B: Would love to play with you guys tonight, but not going to make it this time. Have some work to take care of.

Some observations about these 2 RSVPs:

1. While I don’t like “maybe” responses, sometimes the real response is a maybe, and that’s okay. In those cases, it’s helpful if you provide some color around the maybe, like Friend B did.
2. Friend B followed up with me (in the morning, not 5 minutes before the event) to let me know they couldn’t make it, versus my having to constantly follow up with Friend A.
3. I’m actually much better friends with A than B.
4. Although the end result was the same for both RSVPs, it was much less painful dealing with Friend B compared to Friend A, and I will gladly continue inviting Friend B in the future.

The lesson here is to always follow-up. I make it a point to follow-up on RSVPs because I want to set the expectation that people follow through on what they say, and in so doing my hope is that my circle of friends would buck our current cultural norm of flakiness and not committing to anything.

I will say that I appreciated that neither Friend A nor B asked who or how many people were going to be there (in fact, I didn’t know either until the actual event time 😂). For the record, I’m okay with people asking as long as they do it after they’ve committed, but in general I want people to say yes because I’m organizing it and *I’m* going to be there. Therefore, I usually don’t bother telling people who’s coming, since a) I don’t have time, b) I don’t know until later, and c) I like to keep people in suspense. (Nevertheless, people should always feel free to ask.)

For this particular Wednesday evening in question, a professional indoor volleyball player (let’s call him Jack*) had inexplicably said yes to my invitation, so I excitedly told some of the friends I invited. I had met Jack through a friend and he was super nice, but I had no idea how serious he was about playing with amateurs, or how good his RSVP was going to be. Let’s be real, though, it’s normal to cut some slack for pro athletes, and I wasn’t about to tell him to follow my Rules of the RSVP. Here’s how his RSVP went down:

Monday
Me: Hi Jack, fun meeting you last night! Just wanted to see if you’re free/interested in playing some casual volleyball on Wednesday evening.
Jack: Yeah that was fun! We had originally planned to play in Santa Cruz on Wednesday night but it’s likely to fall through. I’ll let you know if it does.

Tuesday
Jack: I can make it! Send me the location and I’ll see you tomorrow.

In closing, I just want to say…if a professional volleyball player can properly RSVP to a random meetup organized by somebody he barely knows, you can too.

Caption: It was so much fun playing with Jack and other awesome volleyball players. Thankfully he took it easy on us and we had some competitive games all around. Now let’s see if he comes back…

* Jack: not his real name