Hostel breakfast is the best networking event on earth

Consider the conditions. Thirty strangers in one room. None of them have plans for today. All of them are slightly disoriented. Nobody is in a hurry, nobody is being paid to be there, and there is free coffee.

You could not design a better room for meeting people if you tried, and every conference in the world has been trying for forty years.

And yet most people eat their toast facing a wall, looking at a phone, and then go and do a walking tour alone. Here is how not to.

Go early, not late

Between 7.30 and 8.30 the room is people who have somewhere to be and are leaving. Between 10 and 11 it is people who have given up on the day.

The window is roughly 8.30 to 9.30: awake, unhurried, and crucially still deciding what to do. You cannot join a plan that has already been made. You can very easily join one that is still being discussed over a second coffee.

The only opening line that works

"What are you doing today?"

That is it. That is the whole technique. It is not clever and it does not need to be.

It works because it is the question everyone in the room is already privately asking themselves, so you are not interrupting anything — you are joining a thought they were already having. And it has a built-in next move: whatever they say, you can either go with them or say the thing you were thinking of doing, at which point one of you has a plan and the other has an invitation.

Compare it to "where are you from", which is a question with one answer and nowhere to go.

The best opener is not the most interesting question. It is the question that ends with somebody having somewhere to be.

Sit at the big table

There is always a long shared table and several small ones. The small ones are full of pairs. The long one is full of people who arrived alone and are sitting there specifically because it is the table where you are allowed to talk to somebody.

Sitting at the long table is not a social risk. It is the agreed signal for being open to this, understood by everyone in the room, and it is the only thing you actually have to do.

Three things that make you easy to invite

• Be vague about your day. "I might go to the market at some point" is joinable. "I have a 10.15 ticket for the castle" is not.
• Be somewhere for a while. People join a person who is settled, not a person who is clearly leaving in ninety seconds.
• Say yes to the mediocre plan. The plan is not the point. Nobody remembers the museum. They remember the six people they went with.

The catch

You will meet someone on Monday who is leaving on Tuesday, and this happens constantly, and it never stops being slightly sad.

The fix is unglamorous: swap something before the day ends, not at the end of the trip. The friendship that survives is the one where somebody sent a photo three days later. The one that does not is the one where you both meant to and neither did, and you now have a stranger's name in your phone and no idea what they look like.

Eight minutes of toast. Genuinely the highest-leverage part of the day.