Tool
Weekend Activity Picker
Weather, budget, energy and time in — one thing to actually do out.
Weekend Activity Picker
16 activitys match. Each has a 1-in-16 chance.
Four things determine what is actually possible on a given weekend: whether the weather cooperates, how many hours you have, what you are willing to spend, and how much energy you genuinely have rather than the amount you would like to have. Set all four, and draw from what survives.
The energy setting is the one people skip and the one that matters most. An activity list that ignores whether you are exhausted will keep suggesting a five-hour cycle ride to somebody who is not getting off the sofa, and after two of those suggestions the tool loses all credibility.
Every option carries a note about how to actually do it, because "go for a walk" is not a plan and "pick a direction from the map and commit to it before you leave" is.
How the Weekend Activity Picker works — and why it's fair
Each activity is tagged on five axes: outdoor or not, hours needed, a cost band, an energy level from one to three, and whether it works alone. Your four controls intersect against those tags, and the intersection is what gets drawn from. This is an AND across every condition — an activity has to clear all of them.
The intersection is the interesting part, and it collapses faster than people expect. Each individual filter looks mild, but four mild filters compound: bad weather removes roughly half the list, low energy removes another large slice of what is left, a tight time budget cuts again, and a free-only budget cuts again. Four settings that each feel reasonable can leave two options out of twenty.
Once the surviving set exists, the draw is a single unbiased uniform index over it — the same primitive the name picker uses, with no scoring or preference. What makes this tool different from the name picker is not the draw, it is that the sample space is computed rather than supplied.
The weather control is a plain yes-or-no rather than a forecast lookup, and that is deliberate rather than lazy: this page makes no network requests at all, and a location-based forecast would require both a request and your location. You already know whether it is raining.
When the intersection is empty the tool refuses to draw and says which direction to relax. It will not quietly promote an outdoor activity when you said the weather was bad, because a suggestion that ignores a stated constraint teaches you not to trust the next one.
When the Weekend Activity Picker is fair — and when it is not
What it does guarantee
- Every activity clearing all four filters has an identical chance — the tool has no favourites and no hidden ranking.
- The energy and hours filters are upper bounds, so a low setting genuinely excludes anything more demanding rather than merely deprioritising it.
- The surviving count is displayed, so a two-option pool never masquerades as a broad choice.
What it does not
- The corpus is a curated twenty-odd activities, not a database of everything possible near you. Its blind spots are real and invisible from the inside.
- Cost bands are relative, not absolute. What counts as a proper spend differs enormously by where you live.
- It has no idea what you have already done. The same suggestion can come up three weekends running.
Two worked examples
Bad weather, 2 hours, free, low energy, happy alone
- Outdoor options are removed entirely — that is roughly nine of the twenty gone before anything else applies.
- The 2-hour cap and energy-1 setting cut most of the rest.
- Two options typically survive: nap without an alarm, and write letters to three people. Each holds 50%.
Good weather, 5 hours, a proper spend, high energy, group only
- Solo-friendly activities are filtered out by the group requirement, which removes about two-thirds of the list.
- Surviving: try a sport you are certain to be bad at, cook for people who did not expect it, and a long lunch with no end time.
- Three options at 33% each — a narrow but genuinely usable pool.
What people set it for
The recurring Saturday-morning version is the most common: two people, no plan, and a shared reluctance to be the one who proposes something. Setting the four constraints together is itself a useful conversation — agreeing that today is a low-energy day is often the actual decision, and the draw afterwards is almost incidental.
It also gets used defensively, to rule things out. Someone who sets the energy to one and watches fourteen options disappear has learned something concrete about what they were about to overcommit to.
Parents of small children use the hours filter hardest, because two hours is a genuinely different constraint from five and most activity lists ignore the difference. An option tagged four hours is simply not available, which is more honest than a suggestion you would have had to abandon halfway.
For a group decision where everyone should see the options rather than be handed one, the spinner wheel with your own entries is the better format. For an evening rather than a weekend, the dinner decider applies the same filter-then-draw approach to a much shorter time horizon.
Frequently asked questions
Why does it not check the actual weather forecast?
Because this page makes no network requests at all and would need your location to do it. You already know whether it is raining; a checkbox is faster than an API.
Why do my filters keep leaving nothing?
Four filters compound multiplicatively. Each one seems mild alone, but a bad-weather, low-energy, free, two-hour weekend genuinely has very few options — which is information, not a bug.
Is the energy level about physical effort or willingness?
Both, deliberately. Level one means you are not leaving the sofa, whatever the reason. The tool does not distinguish tired from unwilling because the available options are the same either way.
What does the 'doing it alone is fine' setting actually do?
Unchecking it removes every activity tagged as solo-friendly, leaving only those that genuinely need other people. It narrows hard, because most of the list works alone.
Are the hours a hard limit or a suggestion?
A hard upper bound. An activity tagged five hours cannot be drawn when you have set four, even if you might have stretched it.
Can I add my own activities?
No. Every activity carries five tags, and an untagged addition would sit outside the filters entirely rather than at some sensible default.
Why are there notes attached to each suggestion?
Because a bare activity name is not a plan. The note is the smallest amount of specificity that turns a suggestion into something you could actually start doing.
Does it avoid repeating last weekend's suggestion?
No. Each draw is independent and nothing is remembered between visits, so repeats happen at exactly the rate chance predicts.
Is the cost band per person?
Yes, per person, and relative rather than absolute — a three means a genuine spend for you, whatever that number is where you live.