Before Everyone Disappears: A May Guide to Surviving the Summer Social Scatter

Right now, in the first weeks of May, most people’s calendars still look normal. That will not last. Over the next four months, colleagues will start disappearing in staggered blocks: a week here for a family trip, half of July for someone’s parental leave cover, the whole of August if you work anywhere near a country that treats summer as sacred. Meetings get harder to schedule, so people stop scheduling the informal ones first. The standing Tuesday coffee quietly stops happening in June and nobody ever restarts it in September.

This matters more than it sounds like it should, because for a lot of people work is now the only place anything social happens at all. Gallup’s 2024 workplace data found that a quarter of fully remote employees report feeling lonely a lot of the previous day, against 16% of people fully on-site. Hybrid workers sat in between at 21%. Research published in Science this year found that remote work has pushed up the amount of time people spend alone significantly enough to account for a meaningful share of the rise in isolation and mental distress over the past several years — and that remote workers who live alone saw their alone-time increase roughly ten times as much as those who share a home.

None of that is really about summer. But summer is when the thin, informal layer of contact that was propping up an already precarious situation gets thinner still. If your main source of casual human contact is a colleague who happens to be at the next desk on Wednesdays, and that colleague is on leave for three weeks, you don’t have a backup plan. You just have three quiet weeks.

Ambient contact and scheduled contact are not the same thing

Workplace isolation and loneliness are related but distinct — a 2024 study of remote healthcare workers found they don’t move in lockstep, and perceived support from other people changes how much one predicts the other. The practical version of that finding: it is not enough to be “around” people. Ambient proximity, the kind you get from an open office or a Slack channel, disappears the second the other person logs off for their trip. It was never something you controlled.

What you want instead is something scheduled, with a fixed slot, that does not depend on who happens to be free that week. Robert Putnam’s research on the decline of American civic life makes a related point: informal, incidental association has been declining for decades, and what has held up better is the stuff that runs on a fixed schedule — the bowling league, the standing meeting, the thing that happens whether or not you feel like it that day. The same logic applies to a workplace friendship in May. Loose plans dissolve in the face of a holiday calendar. Fixed ones survive it.

Set the recurring thing before the calendar fills up

This is the actual window. Right now, in early May, most people’s July and August are still blank. That is exactly why nothing gets scheduled into them — there’s no urgency yet. But it is also the easiest moment to lock something in, because nobody has to move anything to make room for it.

Pick one person, not a group. Groups fail when even one person is away, because the whole plan collapses into “let’s reschedule,” and reschedules in summer take four weeks to land. One other person means the plan only needs two calendars to align.

Pick a cadence that survives absence — biweekly, not weekly. Weekly plans break the first time either of you is out, and once broken they are hard to restart. Biweekly gives enough slack to skip a week for a trip without the whole thing quietly ending.

Put it somewhere outside work, if you can. Ray Oldenburg’s idea of the third place — a spot that is neither home nor work — matters here specifically because it survives organisational chaos. A recurring lunch tied to “whoever’s in the office” ends the day the office empties for August. A recurring Thursday at the same coffee place near your building, or the same run club session, does not care whether either of your teams is fully staffed.

Name it out loud. “Let’s grab lunch sometime” is not a plan; it is a hope with no calendar entry. “Second and fourth Thursday, 12:30, that sandwich place” is a plan. Send the calendar invite before you send the second message.

If you don’t have anyone to schedule it with yet

Not everyone has a colleague they’d ask. If that’s you, this is also the moment to find a recurring thing that exists independently of your job, because a work friendship formed in May might not survive a reorg in October, and a workplace-only social life is fragile by design. Meetup still runs on the same logic as the office coffee habit — recurring groups tied to an interest rather than a company — and unlike a workplace connection, it doesn’t evaporate when you change jobs or someone gets promoted to a different floor.

The unglamorous truth is that the summer scatter isn’t really a problem to solve in July. It’s a problem to solve now, while the calendar is still empty enough to write something into it that will still be there in August.