The Sunday call

Mam is a pharmacist, a bit of a tennis and badminton superstar, and a chess player. She gets the Sunday call. Ireland is five hours ahead of Michigan, so a set day makes it easy. When my brother Will won his first cap for Ireland, I watched from afar. We’d talked about it for years, playing FIFA and kicking a ball in the back garden.

James Clear asks that about any new habit in his 3-2-1 newsletter. Start small, master showing up, then scale up later. A weekly call passes the test. It doesn’t need a big plan or a free evening. It just needs a slot you keep.

Gabriel writes Gabriel Reality, a newsletter on the science behind everyday habits. In a piece on doing less, better, he describes someone he knew with a huge list of plans. Everything moved and nothing finished. Even the people closest to them felt it: “The relationship would be tended to just enough not to die but never enough to actually deepen.” A set call each week is a small guard against that.

I wrote that in a LinkedIn post about the sports teams I grew up in. Karan Dhir makes a similar point about work in his essay on career bets. Events give you a list of names, he says, not a list of “people who’d take your 11pm call.” Those come from hard things you got through together. Every Christmas I organise a St Stephen’s Day 5-a-side fundraiser at home. Then there’s the board games, and there is always a row… always! The Sunday call keeps the thread going in between.

Pick a day and a time, and send the invite today. It doesn’t have to be long. Twenty minutes on a Sunday is plenty. It could be a parent, a grandparent, an old teammate or a friend who moved away. Then reply and tell me who it is. I’d love to hear how the first call goes.