5 Steps to Plan Your Next Weekend Trip in a JayPad

The end of nerve wrecking group chats and mailing lists is here.

Every year team JayPad and a group of friends go on a weekend trip. This became a beautiful tradition and we always look forward to it. What we did not look forward to, until recently, was setting the whole thing up: Finding a date, a destination, housing, who comes when. All it took was a myriad of emails and a quickly collapsing WhatsApp group.

This is the exact reason why we built JayPads. We wanted to end this endless mess of communication and seriously start getting things done in a group. All it took was building a product with basically zero friction and a slightly different concept to collaboration software than what we knew at that time: JayPads add a second layer to a group chat in which more permanent information can be stored, additionally JayPads do not require an App download or setting up an account, which makes them the perfect solution for making plans in a group.

1 Find a date. This is what normally is the most excruciating part of any weekend trip: Finding the best time to get together. There’s quite a few tools which aim to solely solve this problem — and to great success sometimes. Unfortunately these tools seem to follow a certain business development strategy: build a consumer product for free and cross-sell into B2B segments. Which seldom leads to significant evolvement of said consumer product which is much more an anchor for selling a B2B solution.

What we figured is that making plans in a group seldom is a one dimensional coordination problem (finding a date) but comes with multiple questions at once.

Looking to find a date? Just poll and find the time that works for everyone.

So when we finally found a date for our weekend trip through a mix of WhatsApp and Doodle, inevitably the next questions was: “Where do we go?”. This question could be just as well “which movie do we see?”, “which restaurant do we go to?”, or “who is driving?”.

So, since we now have established that making plans in a group typically requires coordination on more than one matter it would be really handy if this could be done under one roof. This roof is provided by JayPads.

2 Find a destination. Like finding a date, finding the destination you want to go to lends itself perfectly for a democratic vote — just poll the options that come to mind and decide as a group. Fin.

Poll the destination and save time otherwise wasted with arguing.

3 Find housing. By now you should notice a pattern: Voting for options which are matter to subjective opinion is much more convenient than discussing them via chat. Of course you can engage in a hearty discussion on wether Airbnb, a simple hostel or plain camping are what its going to be. But you will get to your goal much faster if you decide via a single click. Draws can be discussed. Added options can be discussed. But please: Just vote for the end result.

Looking to find consensus on where to stay? Again, a simple poll comes in handy.

4 Store the important info. At every group chat for planning a weekend trip with friends in the history of mankind at some point someone asked for “that link to the voting for a date” or “which address are we heading to?” or… These information can and should be neatly put into a note. This serves as a sticky post to your whole endeavour and helps you guys keeping sanity.

Make a sticky note of important information — this will keep others from asking the same questions over and over.

5Have a great time! May your weekend trip be as seamless as it will have been setting it up. We’d recommend diving directly into it by creating your own JayPad — there’s always an occasion to get the gang together and now you have a tool at your hands to set this up quickly.

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