Interesting way to approach it, my approach might be less technical, when someone comes to mind randomly, I just txt them with:
Hey, you just popped into my mind, I hope all is well with you and yours!
It's simple, lightweight, and you'd be shocked how often the other person pings back.
My completely un-scientific view is that most people think of others once in a while. Perhaps we're too busy to reach out, or the guilt of getting out of touch makes it hard to push through that resistance. I just push through it.
Hm interesting. I’ve actually gotten these types of messages before, and now they seem strange. My replies were enthusiastic but did not lead to anymore than a shallow interaction, so I felt it was a waste of my time. Perhaps my cynical view, but I don’t want to be used for someone else’s need to feel like they’re connecting with someone when they’re not interested in more than a hello and hope you’re well. Those are small talk and are taxing on me :-(
Years ago I read the book, "How to Practice" by the Dalai Lama. Like any book, there were a few parts that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, one of them was:
"If you are in the right frame of mind, your worst enemy cannot hurt you. If you are in the wrong frame of mind, your best friend visiting can seem like a horrific chore."
Sometimes shallow interactions are fine. Like bread in your diet, there's nothing wrong with it so long as it isn't the only interaction.
It's an opportunity for engagement. Sometimes nobody wants to take the opportunity but it's valuable to have.
If you want it to be more engaging, make it so. Ask questions in return, share good responses. "How are you?" can be answered in one word or several paragraphs.
Exactly. Agree with this. I think we come to terms at a certain point that its impossible to stay in touch with everyone.
I actually kept a table with people to stay in touch with them every:
- month
- quarter
- 6 months
- a year
(if its less then you remember anyways)
I quickly killed that approach, because people who genuinely understand overwhelm also are always happy to catch-up once in a while and we hold no hard feelings if we don't speak for another year.
I agree, but I also think it's also an issue (particularly with the popularity of social media) that people are often trying to keep in contact with many more people but also interacting a lot more than in the past.
For instance, I know people who were part of the greatest generation that would have decades long pen-pal type relationships with people they hadn't seen in person in years. It was pretty common for them to send several long hand written letters to several of these friends every year, for 30, 40, 50 years. But I don't think I've encountered anyone in younger generations who would do that.
15-20 years ago, I had a number of e-mail acquaintances who I'd send long e-mail to every few months, and they'd send another long e-mail in return. This went on for years, but with the increase in popularity of social media, these exchanges dwindled into nothingness.
Likewise, I remember when almost everyone I knew was on AIM. But that became old fashioned, for some reason. Not for any particular reason; people still can and do communicate with text messages, and it was no extra effort to keep an AIM client running in the background. But when something new comes along, there's usually an exodus from the old.
Up until recently it seemed that Facebook was the platform to communicate, and it had a very specific, shallow form of communication sent to everyone. Though now even that seems to be dying down.
Mst people are driven by social trends at large. If you sent a handwritten letter to an acquaintance at one point in time, you'd get one in return. Likewise with a friendly e-mail talking about your life. Nothing we have now is really a replacement for e-mail, but it's more trendy, so the old form of communication gets completely neglected.
I don't know what it is in me or how it got there, but I seem to be thoroughly convinced that I'll only be bothering people. When I rationally think about it, even emotionally, I disagree, yet I cannot shake the instinctual feeling.
I think both approaches work. Like, most people survive with a to-do loop just in their brains, stochastically prioritizing and picking tasks to do as circumstances change. The difficulty comes in when a person either doesn't have the capacity for multiple threads in their mind (ie mental disorder, creative loop dominance, overwhelm, unreliable memory, etc) or when a person wants to focus their mind completely on some personal endeavor.
It's likely that most traditionally successful people have some sort of task system in their life. Who's to say that the most socially "successful" people don't have similar systems as well? It reminds me of the show Veep, where the main character's entourage whispers in her ear the name and info about a person she's about to shake hands with. The whole persona of a politician is based on making and juggling and keeping connections open. Biden is still in regular contact with people from decades ago from the beginning of his career, for example.
I told a friend once that I was using the Habitica game to help me stay productive. He was incredulous, "You really need a piece of software to tell you what to do?!" He manages and co-owns several ice cream stores, so I know the stochastic method is feasible in more complex lifestyles. That's just not the case for my brain.
I admit that I am hesitant to build a social system because of the expectation of perception of cynicism or even sociopathy. I have my friend's birthdays on my calendar. Why shouldn't I also have a little blurb about what they like, what they're up to and a log of our contact? I think I would be floored and honored if I found out a friend lovingly kept little journal entries about me, I mean, after the intial weirded-outness I guess.
I like this. I'd like it a ton if I had a single feed that would aggregate my texts, whatsapp, my various email addresses, telegram, signal, skype, zoom, facebook messenger ...
it's funny you say that. i've had thoughts about getting more organized like this, but then have come to realize "wait a minute, this means i'm industrializing my personal life with actual crm techniques. how do i feel about this? ick!"
but... maybe that's what you have to do when you get older, busier and more forgetful and maybe it's not icky at all, as you still maintain who goes on the lists.
Yeah this works great until you realize you're the one _always_ initiating and they say "Wow thanks for getting in touch" and you don't talk to them for another 3 years.
Yeah, this happens to me a lot. But I’ve accepted that’s the price to be paid for keeping in touch with certain people. Of course, there are plenty of times when I decide it’s not worth it to be the only one who reaches out.
If I got a message like that, I would wonder which kind of sausage app or Like-Facebook-for-X development project, you wanted to peddle on me this time.
I started doing this with covid lockdowns, and it's been wonderful. I've had days-long text chains with people that naturally drop off again for a few months, but got us both caught up. I've had meaningful connections with past colleagues that made us both realize how much friendship was formed at work. I've even had it pivot to zoom and a couple of times turn into not just a friendly catch up but learning about opportunities at someone's new company (I'm actively job searching too).
At the end of the day, just catching up with people that I used to see and talk to on a daily/weekly cadence has been a significant emotional boon, and I don't see any downsides. Some of the reaching out didn't go anywhere, and that's fine - most were very worth my time.
That’s been my approach too (with a spreadsheet though) and at first I just jotted down names but once i reach out to someone I update the spreadsheet with a durable contact info (not a work email)
I think phone numbers and social profiles are probably the most future proof, as I see a pattern of people moving away from personal email for anything other than spam and shopping related receipts
It sounds like good advice. Heck I don't wanna automate my life, especially not up that point. Imagine if the people the author contacted knew why, I wouldn't be too happy about it.
Slightly related, I try to remember my closest friends birthdays, means more to me if I can remember it rather than a generic reminder...
Yup. I started doing it after some friends disappeared out of my life not due to any reason, just.. social entropy. So I started reaching out.
Sometimes conversations don't go anywhere, just the "How are you?" "Fine" kind of stuff. Never had a negative experience. Have had a fair amount of positive ones - news about friends having kids, finding partners, new jobs, etc. A few people who had left my life are now back in my orbit.
At the cost of a few minutes, it's potentially high gain.
I do something similar, and actually wrote an app to help recently. It goes one step further by allowing you to specify different messages that it can use at random. The landing page for the app is at http://communiqai.com.
The flopping in animations on this are really annoying in my opinion. It makes me think the product will be equally annoying to my friends so I didn't sign up even though the concept interests me.
Some comments here claim that he is treating people not as friends. IMO these comments are not charitable a interpretation. While it is a plausible interpretation, I have strongly learned from HN to be charitable and optimistic when reading someone else's point of view. I know with topics like this that perspectives vary more wildly among people, so let me show you why I can be more optimistic in my interpretation.
I think it's perfectly fine to separate emotions and reason like this. The reason: I am on the other side when it comes to managing my friends: I am not separating reason and emotion. Because of that, I am failing hard at staying in touch with people that I would like to stay in touch with (I am noticing it with certain friends of my as well). I am succeeding to stay in touch with a few people, but if I'd have a system like this I might be able to stay in touch with many more people that I'd like to stay in touch with anyway but for some unknown reason have some sort of blockade or friction.
Other than that I think the interpretation is not charitable enough, I also have personal experience that it might be wrong. For example, I view the dating markets strictly from a market perspective that is heavily inspired by micro-economics and "common sense". Initially, such a perspective is detached from emotion, but there are certain points where it is attached (e.g. with supply/demand questions like: "what do I want/need from a partner" or "What can I offer? What do I want to offer? What do I need to offer?"). Moreover, upon meeting people there is empathy, sympathy and human intuition involved. Sometimes the emotions will be so strong that I have a compulsion towards meeting a person again (e.g. falling in love). Those emotions are not helping! Sometimes I feel the right amount that is also in line with my other needs and in other cases I don't feel enough about a certain person when I don't see them (but when I do see them, I am delighted to catch up).
Management of personal life != how people are on a moment by moment basis in personal life
I think by having a system like this, you can put Dunbar's number to shame.
I have a similarly non-cynical view of this and am considering to implement something similar for myself.
The reasons are simple:
1. I don't want to wake up one day 20 or so years from now and realize that I'm old and lonely.
2. It's possible to lose friends/acquaintances if you don't talk to them for some amount of time
3. I am generally happy when people I've had positive interactions with in the past contact me out of the blue
4. However I am bad at doing this myself
5. It is reasonable to assume that the above also applies to many other people, so why not take the initiative?
Of course you could use this system to spam and annoy people, do unsavory marketing stuff, etc. but that doesn't mean it's not a useful framework for staying in touch with people who would be happy that someone is staying in touch with them.
I made it a habit to speak to a friend every day of the week while taking my walk. The rest follows effortlessly - I usually rotate friends and end up with 7 to 10 people in a frequent conversation pool.
Absolutely. When Facebook got to the point that my old friends and family were ubiquitously present, it was a godsend. I reestablished contact with people I hadn't heard from for years, kept up-to-date on family that I would otherwise not have heard from - it was great.
Lately, Facebook doesn't do a very good job of this, so I've been thinking of better ways of doing it. Something like an email reminder might work.
I get thinking about a system like this. I have given some thought about building something similar, but always ended up abandoning it for the exact same reasons this post strikes me as extremely weird:
- It feels weird classifying people in boxes of desired contact frequency. How do you decide that? Does the author think "I honestly don't care enough about this person to contact them more than once a year" ? Then why are these people still "friends"?
- Lack of flexibility. Organic relationships will have different contact frequencies over time. For example, I might have inconsistent contacts with a friend that I've known for a long time because of reasons, but if they're having a rough time I will probably be more attentive and want to contact them more frequently.
- Relationships are two-way, so you'd expect that the other part initiates contact a significant amount of the times. Given the myriad of ways that contact can happen, updating the database for hundreds of people can be a real hassle. The fact that this is not mentioned at all indicates that a lot of these might be one-way relationships, not actual friendships.
- I find it really really hard to write non-artificial messages when contacting on a schedule. Maybe the first one can be believable, but the second or third time you contact someone without any obvious trigger, it starts to feel weird. I think most people would catch wind that the other person is not contacting organically but on some kind of schedule, and I guess it could make them feel really weird about it: "This person doesn't really think of me, doesn't see any of my social media/blog/whatever updates... why are they contacting me?"
I understand what other people are saying in the comments about forgetting to contact people or being too busy, and needing reminders. But I don't think that's the same problem the author is solving.
Think of it as the lowest common denominator. It isn't "this person is not important, so I will contact them only once a year", it is "this person is important enough for me to contact them AT LEAST once per year". Flexibility isn't lost, but you have baseline level of commitment to every relationship. If you don't want to contact that person anymore - it's a conscious choice, not "just lost touch", but if you want to contact them, you have prompt "you are about to loose contact, do you REALLY want to do that?".
> I find it really really hard to write non-artificial messages when contacting on a schedule. Maybe the first one can be believable, but the second or third time you contact someone without any obvious trigger, it starts to feel weird. I think most people would catch wind that the other person is not contacting organically but on some kind of schedule, and I guess it could make them feel really weird about it: "This person doesn't really think of me, doesn't see any of my social media/blog/whatever updates... why are they contacting me?"
You, obviously, SHOULD try to read blog/twitter/whatever BEFORE contacting that person, try to find something interesting there and talk about it. Or check notes about person's interests and bring up something you recently saw/heard, that is related to their interests. I doubt that nothing interesting happened to person in three months that you hadn't spoke with them, so you have something to talk about. And some people don't use social media, and asking about their wellbeing is completely normal.
> Relationships are two-way, so you'd expect that the other part initiates contact a significant amount of the times.
Seems both fair and reasonable, but IME it's wrong.
It's wrong in a way that is stable as well, and that is why it takes effort to fight: people easily get anxious about rejection, and they easily get it in their heads that the other person doesn't want to hear from them. Anything from "we had a bad interaction" to "they didn't reply last time" seems to be an excuse to cut contact.
According to (probably dubious) tests, I'm not especially extroverted or introverted. But I make conscious effort to keep contacts alive, because I just like the human contact and keeping updated on people's stories.
It's also the case that people like to help, and will do so readily if you reach out to them, which is another weird hold-up in people's minds (can I ask this person that I kinda know about this thing? 90% of the time, yes). Just this week I reached out to people who were my primary school teachers for some advice, I kid you not. Now do I talk much to these ladies that I knew 30 years ago? No. Now and again I'll send out a short piece about how my family is doing, and that's it. But even if they read it and don't reply, chances are they appreciate it. Kinda like TCP, you can have an open connection even though nothing is sent over it.
Another case is that friend who sucks at staying in touch. I have a number of friends who are super warm and chummy when I'm near them, but they never take it upon themselves to initiate anything. Think about when you were a kid, how many people did you hang out with, vs how many people bothered to organize parties? It's like 50 and 4. So a lot of people will just wait for an invite, and they'll get enough that they don't need to do anything.
As for the logistics, I don't have a custom program to do it for me, it's just a Trello, plus FB and LinkedIn that I scan from time to time. FB tells me birthdays, so that is a good time to write a DM. LinkedIn tells me when they changed jobs, which is also a good time to update. And then Trello because not everyone is active on the other two. I'll also do a quick scan if I'm travelling, in case someone I know is at the destination, and I'll send out some emails at Christmas/NY.
I use a much simpler system, I have recurring reminders setup and when they trigger I just reach out to that person. I try to keep things light, like a text message, photo, link, etc. the great thing is that you can use the same message/photo/link for everyone. At first it felt impersonal but the message is always simply a trigger for the conversation that comes next. Ultimately it doesn’t matter what you say when you reach out.
Look, I'm 55 years old. There are people I haven't heard from in maybe thirty years, easy. I wouldn't mind catching up on those people yearly - and it would be at least a thirty-fold improvement over my current management technique, right?
Yep. I’m bad at contacting family and my 700+ ppl in LinkedIn and yes I know them all or would not add them in the first place. Definitely going to try this.
If anyone reading this builds software like this, and releases it publicly, whether free or for sale, please let me know. I'd be happy to send people your way.
Because of https://sive.rs/dbt I get a few emails a week from strangers, asking if my software is public yet, or if not, what else I would recommend. (And I might never make my software public. It's too tied-in to my now-complex PostgreSQL system of everything.)
I'm definitely going to send people to Jakob's post here now. But if interested in this subject, please email me here:
My implementation of your system is just a bunch of markdown files. The title of the file is a friend's name, the frontmatter at the top keeps info about them that doesn't change too often (ex: birthday, address, kids names), and each time I chat with them I add a section with an H1 title that's the date we chatted (ex: "# 2022-02-14\n"). My notes about the chat go under that heading.
Based off of that structure I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts:
- print out a list of upcoming birthdays, half birthdays, birthdays on Jupiter, etc. of all my friends
- print out a list of friends I haven't contacted within my desired `frequency` (the subject of this post)
- create or open the friend file containing a particular name from the command line (ex: `,people Sarah` prints out all the Sarah files I have and asks me which I'd like to open)
I think plain text is the way to go with something as personal as a system for keeping track of your friends. I was inspired to go this route by your post on journaling[1]:
> If digital, use only plain text. It’s a standard format not owned by any company. It will be readable in 50 years on devices we haven’t even imagined yet. Don’t use formats that can only be read by one program, because that program won’t be around in 50 years. Don’t use the cloud, unless you’re also going to download it weekly and back it up in plain text outside that cloud. (Companies shut down. Clouds disappear. Think long-term.)
I've been chewing on how to make this system something that might be used by other people who don't know how to use the command line. Something like the way Obsidian[2] works might make sense.
In 25+ years of keeping people in my database, and writing plain text all day, I'd never once considered keeping my list of people in plain text files.
Sorry to butt in, but this is a fallacy that I see expressed a lot (and shares a lot of similarities to the "computers can execute improperly-typed programs" fallacy), and that has caused a non-trivial amount of harm.
>> If digital, use only plain text. It’s a standard format not owned by any company.
This is fine for anything where you don't care about the computer processing your data (e.g. a journal where you don't care about tagging or sorting by date or whatever), but it sounds like you do (based on "Based off of that structure I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts"), so:
"Plain text" is mutually exclusive with machine-parsing, because "plain text" is not a format. If I create a text file for each of my friends, and somewhere in each file is an English-language description of my friend's name, then that is both (a) plain-text and (b) not machine-parseable at all.
A "format" is necessarily structured - something like "each line of this file represents a "row", which is divided into "fields" by commas". But then you don't have a plain-text file - you have CSV, or JSON, or something that's a subset of "plain text file", but is still a structured, machine-parseable format.
Even if you do what I did and create your own ad-hoc format like "text files are broken into "blobs", where each blob is separated from others by a blank line, and has a header consisting of the blob name..." - that's still not plain text. You've still invented your own structured-object-embedded-in-text format - except that because you aren't using JSON or XML or CSV, you're incompatible with every tool in existence, and have to write tools to parse, lint, generate, and process these files yourself.
(and, hence, it's not a "standard format" - each ad-hoc plain-text-embedded format is different, except for the ones that are either accidentally exactly the same, or the ones that are standardized and have names - at which point plain-text purists claim that they're no longer plain-text)
You use Markdown - which means that you have all of the problems above, because Markdown encodes formatting, not structure. You even alluded to it yourself - you say that "...I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts" because you had to write those scripts to handle your own custom format, instead of just using JSON and writing data["first-name"] in Python.
It's your system, so you can do what you want - just don't fool yourself (or others) into believing that you're saving effort, because you're not - you're just reinventing a wheel that has been reinvented millions of times before.
(this isn't meant to be a random rant - I'm currently in the middle of rewriting my own system from using my own custom, ad-hoc structured text format to using s-expressions and typed objects. there's hundreds of thousands of objects spanning thousands of files, and the process is absolutely miserable - I want to save as many other people from having to go through this as I can)
I've been working on one of these on and off for a while now!
It'll eventually be up on gosayhito.com. I'll try to remind you when it's done, but you can also probably put the website in as a monthly thing to check on.
My main issue with keeping in touch with people is that texting someone you only vaguely know is kinda weird. You don't see the other person, you don't hear them, you can't know what's in their mind. Those exchanges often just hang in a weird void after a few texts and it's unsure when/how to continue from there.
On the other hand, calling someone you don't know well (even someone you do know!) feels even weirder and more invasive those days. I don't remember when I last called someone else than my close family (and very close friends upon first fixing a date/time for the call).
Yeah I tried giving up social media for a while and just texting my actual friends etc instead.
It works for the groups of friends that we have active WhatsApp groups with. But especially texting friends of the opposite sex - now that we're grown up, married, etc - just feels invasive, unless it's asking a specific question, or to arrange something.
I feel exactly the same, and honestly, it keeps me from approaching some people I‘d like to.
If anyone has figured out a pretext or mental framework for warming up conversations that have effectively died long ago, I would be delighted to know about it.
I find it nice, if it's not spammy. Two relatively distant friends starting do a quarterly "newsletter" of their projects and I found myself getting in touch with them more often. Same with strangers on social media. Often good things happen when you 'just go for it'.
Yeah, a big part of being social is about stifling the expectation of rejection. No one is going to yell at you for asking how their day was. No one is going to call the cops if you send them a text "Hey, wanted to catch up. How's your week going? I saw this super insightful comment by nefitty on HN about being social and it made me realize we hadn't talked in a bit."
Perhaps a 15-30 year old thing, but for those people in my B/C/D list (never thought about it that way before), one thing I do is if they are active on Instagram I will send a response to their story if it looks interesting. More casual than a text, but it opens the door to a quick conversation.
Have you ever played Stardew Valley? One game mechanic involves managing relationships with members of the town. You need to discover peoples' likes and dislikes, keep up contact, and remember their birthdays and probably a few other rules I'm forgetting. There's essentially a spreadsheet that you manage. It's the strangest thing to me - it feels like the way an autistic person might view relationships, but also like it's common sense. I think it's just that in real life you're better off not keeping score on some things.
The biggest reason I don't maintain contact with people from my past is I was a much worse person in my past and I'm either embarrassed about my behavior or concerned that my shittiness is what led to our relationship in the first place.
In any case, I find it's easier (and emotionally satisfying) to stay in touch with a couple people that I can have natural, unforced conversations with. Scheduling interactions on a calendar feels odd. It makes me think of those emails you get "from" somebody after signing up for a service, and after a few you notice their time stamps all end in 00:00.
> The biggest reason I don't maintain contact with people from my past is I was a much worse person in my past and I'm either embarrassed about my behavior or concerned that my shittiness is what led to our relationship in the first place.
Perfect summary. The people I'm still in contact with are those that grew into better people together with me.
I like to think I chose depth over breadth. I can count my real friends on one hand and I feel like we have deep and meaningful friendships. They're people who I've been through some shit with, or people who I'd be prepared to go through some shit with if it came to it.
Everyone else is someone who can come and go. How long are they around for? Who knows, it's just a temporary crossing of paths that feels nice while it lasts. I couldn't maintain a connect with hundreds of people unless fate crossed our paths again.
But, you know, even those deep connections might be temporary, just on a longer timeframe. If one connection faded then perhaps there'd be room for a new one.
I think this is for higher level contact - not personal friendships. Networking for professional development - more along those lines.
Something I need to get back into. Interacting, at least casually, on a routine basis with a wide amount of people has lead to every job I have ever held - they came to me based on my reputation or past interactions. It's definitely the best way to get a new (and better) job rather than blindly fishing for them.
That's the real power of systems like this. Not to develop personal friendships, but to remain relevant in the eyes of a large number of people so that if they have a future opportunity you will be top of mind for how they can get it addressed.
I think it's why he stresses making the contacts personal and with meaning/value specific to that person. These aren't soulless automated computer generated emails, but a system to prompt him to write relevant and sincere contact messages.
Is it a lot of work? Sure. But building up a network of people who see you as contributing value is priceless.
> The biggest reason I don't maintain contact with people from my past is I was a much worse person in my past and I'm either embarrassed about my behavior or concerned that my shittiness is what led to our relationship in the first place.
I feel the same. In fact, I intentionally avoid interacting with people from my past since they may have bad memories involving me that I'd be resurfacing by contacting them. I've considered reaching out to certain people to apologize, but I stopped when I realized I was mostly just looking for absolution rather than actually trying to make them feel better. To me, the kindest thing I can do is stay out of their lives.
I do the same, but it often makes me worried about what kind of person I am. I don't really have too much to apologize about - at least that I know of. But for some reason, I tend to grow apart from people who know my past or who simply know too much about me. Not every single one of them, but apart from very few people, this is the case. I think it's safe to say I have trust issues, but I never understood why, as I haven't suffered any trauma and don't really have a reason to be this way.
I consider this to be a bad trait, because finding new friends isn't easy and I'm trying to get rid of this habit.
I hate when a service normally sends emails from Service Name, but then once in a while they send an email from Firstname Lastname to make it look personal. It's not going to work, but it sure is annoying.
There’s a CRM of some sort that sends emails I’ve received that even mentions a nearby restaurant or point of interest in its emails. It’s trying so hard to be personal it’s laughable.
You’re not scheduling interactions with this system, you’re just reminding yourself about the people you enjoyed talking to.
Nothing prevents you from talking to these people more frequently, this system seems more like a way to nudge you to remind you about conversations you forgot.
I dunno, I am very bad on the phone and an introvert but I found that even after a few years I have people who are genuinely happy to speak with me. I forced myself to call one of them last week and reconnected. Not my best friend but feels good
The forcing is weird, right? Why in the world does it take so much work to reach out to someone?
The obvious explanation would be fear of rejection.
Another story you could tell is fear of connection due to opportunity cost -- what if, among all the people you could connect with, this one isn't a great choice but will end up consuming a lot of your time?
This is me 100%. Although I've found that when I do talk to folks and apologize for some of the shittiest shittiness, more often than not they don't even remember what I'm talking about. The lesson here, for me at least, is that I blow things way out of proportion. (This is not surprising news.)
Or, alternatively, they're giving you a polite "out" and enabling mutual forgetting. I've been on the wrong side of this dynamic too many times and I think that when the other person claims not to remember, most of the time they're telling the truth - of course they didn't ruminate on that-thing-you-did as much as you did - but sometimes, I think it's intentional amnesia to avoid the social overhead of addressing the event head-on.
I moved back to my hometown 20 years after leaving. At one point I thought I should pull out my old yearbooks to try to remember who everyone was. I decided that was a bad idea. It would be better to learn who everyone is.
Well I definitely heard that. I have a thing the voices in my head periodically inflict on me that I call Embarrassment Day, where I spend the day remembering past incidents that I'm embarrassed about. Lots of fun.
The silver lining of course is that if you're embarrassed about things in the past, it means you've grown enough since then to be embarrassed about them. If all you want to do is double down on everything you did, either you were already perfect or you haven't grown at all since then.
Valid points, but this post is about organizing communication for professional development. The author mentions referrals and interesting code. Consider a professor and past grad students.
> Of course, not everyone publishes content or updates regularly. In that case, I usually just ask what they’ve been up to lately.
> You’d be surprised how many people are really happy to get these kinds of messages and they often spark all kinds of deeper conversations.
I had an acquaintance I barely had any common interests with that every few weeks out of the blue would ask me "what's up?". Not once did it lead to any value for me or him and just mildly annoyed me and made me less likely to cooperate if he ever needed help. I'd still help him, because I'm a helpful person but I'd have more mixed feelings about it than if he was just memory of last pleasant interaction from few years prior than fresh memory of scheduled networking/nagging.
I think if you can't personalize approach to provide value to that person with your interactions you should skip keeping in touch because you might be worse off.
You know it's funny - I read your comment earlier today and it stuck out because I have one old acquaintance who does the same thing -- we really weren't that close when we lived in the same city but he still pings me every once in a while just to say "what's up?". For some reason I find it exceedingly annoying, although I generally really like staying in touch with people.
Anyway, as if his ears were burning, he actually sent me a "what's up?" text about 5 minutes ago (first time in a year). So I had to come back here and comment because the timing was just too perfect :)
Part of the problem is friend are like dating, for it to not be annoying you gotta both actually like each other. The acquaintances who do this to me I usually don’t really like. But there are other people I would be happy to hear from in this way.
An important aspect of this kind of workflow — one that is kinda glossed over in the convo here — is that the relationship one have with a contact is fluid. If the convo with a contact is cool, and you're both having fun, you're probably gonna bump to more frequent exchanges, while if the contact never seems to engage, you're probably going to bump them down or even remove them from the workflow. There is no point in annoying people.
Clearly, this acquaintance of yours is not taking your lack of response into account. Or, they're just trying to get closer to you and you might be reading their message as inpersonal when it is actually genuine. Anyway, I can't see myself sending multiple messages per month to someone who never answers back.
Many people have mentioned Monica, which is what I use for this.
I live overseas from loved ones and old friends, meaning there are few natural cues to encourage communication. Without very regular chats my memory doesn't let me be as in context with the major things happening in their lives as I need to be to have meaningful conversations with them. Monica helps with both of these things.
Getting reminders only really helps if the interactions themselves are also rewarding when you do them. If, say, calling an elderly family member feels more like a chore, it's easy to end up skipping the reminders more than you'd like.
Chiming to say that I also use a self-hosted instance of Monica.
I hop between a lot of projects and hobbies so I tend to be a bit scatterbrained. Having a central store of my contacts, past events, their likes/dislikes is extremely useful for me.
The next logical step is to have AI (GPT-3?) read the social posts of the contact and produce an email based on that and the last email. I hope the poor people on the other end of the author's networking scheme also have AI to read this and reply.
Just ask Eric Schmidt. Oh, wait. Whacky parsed as ad making sites. Nevermind. Didn't that guy write something about AI with another guy named Henry? Is AI trying to get us mad or get us laid? Somebody needs to write a program to figure that out and turn it into DoggyDuJourCoin. I heard you can make easy money doing that. It's all good. Who wants to bother with thinking when computers can do that for us now. I'm sure nobody is trying to take advantage of people who don't do that. #PTBarnum
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My completely un-scientific view is that most people think of others once in a while. Perhaps we're too busy to reach out, or the guilt of getting out of touch makes it hard to push through that resistance. I just push through it.
Years ago I read the book, "How to Practice" by the Dalai Lama. Like any book, there were a few parts that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, one of them was:
"If you are in the right frame of mind, your worst enemy cannot hurt you. If you are in the wrong frame of mind, your best friend visiting can seem like a horrific chore."
It's an opportunity for engagement. Sometimes nobody wants to take the opportunity but it's valuable to have.
If you want it to be more engaging, make it so. Ask questions in return, share good responses. "How are you?" can be answered in one word or several paragraphs.
I actually kept a table with people to stay in touch with them every: - month - quarter - 6 months - a year (if its less then you remember anyways)
I quickly killed that approach, because people who genuinely understand overwhelm also are always happy to catch-up once in a while and we hold no hard feelings if we don't speak for another year.
Serendipity and randomness wins.
For instance, I know people who were part of the greatest generation that would have decades long pen-pal type relationships with people they hadn't seen in person in years. It was pretty common for them to send several long hand written letters to several of these friends every year, for 30, 40, 50 years. But I don't think I've encountered anyone in younger generations who would do that.
15-20 years ago, I had a number of e-mail acquaintances who I'd send long e-mail to every few months, and they'd send another long e-mail in return. This went on for years, but with the increase in popularity of social media, these exchanges dwindled into nothingness.
Likewise, I remember when almost everyone I knew was on AIM. But that became old fashioned, for some reason. Not for any particular reason; people still can and do communicate with text messages, and it was no extra effort to keep an AIM client running in the background. But when something new comes along, there's usually an exodus from the old.
Up until recently it seemed that Facebook was the platform to communicate, and it had a very specific, shallow form of communication sent to everyone. Though now even that seems to be dying down.
Mst people are driven by social trends at large. If you sent a handwritten letter to an acquaintance at one point in time, you'd get one in return. Likewise with a friendly e-mail talking about your life. Nothing we have now is really a replacement for e-mail, but it's more trendy, so the old form of communication gets completely neglected.
Randomness you said?
ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1
It's likely that most traditionally successful people have some sort of task system in their life. Who's to say that the most socially "successful" people don't have similar systems as well? It reminds me of the show Veep, where the main character's entourage whispers in her ear the name and info about a person she's about to shake hands with. The whole persona of a politician is based on making and juggling and keeping connections open. Biden is still in regular contact with people from decades ago from the beginning of his career, for example.
I told a friend once that I was using the Habitica game to help me stay productive. He was incredulous, "You really need a piece of software to tell you what to do?!" He manages and co-owns several ice cream stores, so I know the stochastic method is feasible in more complex lifestyles. That's just not the case for my brain.
I admit that I am hesitant to build a social system because of the expectation of perception of cynicism or even sociopathy. I have my friend's birthdays on my calendar. Why shouldn't I also have a little blurb about what they like, what they're up to and a log of our contact? I think I would be floored and honored if I found out a friend lovingly kept little journal entries about me, I mean, after the intial weirded-outness I guess.
I call it "The Poor Man's CRM"
but... maybe that's what you have to do when you get older, busier and more forgetful and maybe it's not icky at all, as you still maintain who goes on the lists.
I started to write too long comment about how I feel scheduling my life would not work for me, but that doesn't add anything to the discussion.
I've just texted an old friend.
And I think I'll set up some yearly reminder to reach my few friends that don't respond anymore, but that I care about anyway.
At the end of the day, just catching up with people that I used to see and talk to on a daily/weekly cadence has been a significant emotional boon, and I don't see any downsides. Some of the reaching out didn't go anywhere, and that's fine - most were very worth my time.
I think phone numbers and social profiles are probably the most future proof, as I see a pattern of people moving away from personal email for anything other than spam and shopping related receipts
Sometimes conversations don't go anywhere, just the "How are you?" "Fine" kind of stuff. Never had a negative experience. Have had a fair amount of positive ones - news about friends having kids, finding partners, new jobs, etc. A few people who had left my life are now back in my orbit.
At the cost of a few minutes, it's potentially high gain.
I think it's perfectly fine to separate emotions and reason like this. The reason: I am on the other side when it comes to managing my friends: I am not separating reason and emotion. Because of that, I am failing hard at staying in touch with people that I would like to stay in touch with (I am noticing it with certain friends of my as well). I am succeeding to stay in touch with a few people, but if I'd have a system like this I might be able to stay in touch with many more people that I'd like to stay in touch with anyway but for some unknown reason have some sort of blockade or friction.
Other than that I think the interpretation is not charitable enough, I also have personal experience that it might be wrong. For example, I view the dating markets strictly from a market perspective that is heavily inspired by micro-economics and "common sense". Initially, such a perspective is detached from emotion, but there are certain points where it is attached (e.g. with supply/demand questions like: "what do I want/need from a partner" or "What can I offer? What do I want to offer? What do I need to offer?"). Moreover, upon meeting people there is empathy, sympathy and human intuition involved. Sometimes the emotions will be so strong that I have a compulsion towards meeting a person again (e.g. falling in love). Those emotions are not helping! Sometimes I feel the right amount that is also in line with my other needs and in other cases I don't feel enough about a certain person when I don't see them (but when I do see them, I am delighted to catch up).
Management of personal life != how people are on a moment by moment basis in personal life
I think by having a system like this, you can put Dunbar's number to shame.
The reasons are simple:
1. I don't want to wake up one day 20 or so years from now and realize that I'm old and lonely.
2. It's possible to lose friends/acquaintances if you don't talk to them for some amount of time
3. I am generally happy when people I've had positive interactions with in the past contact me out of the blue
4. However I am bad at doing this myself
5. It is reasonable to assume that the above also applies to many other people, so why not take the initiative?
Of course you could use this system to spam and annoy people, do unsavory marketing stuff, etc. but that doesn't mean it's not a useful framework for staying in touch with people who would be happy that someone is staying in touch with them.
Lately, Facebook doesn't do a very good job of this, so I've been thinking of better ways of doing it. Something like an email reminder might work.
- It feels weird classifying people in boxes of desired contact frequency. How do you decide that? Does the author think "I honestly don't care enough about this person to contact them more than once a year" ? Then why are these people still "friends"?
- Lack of flexibility. Organic relationships will have different contact frequencies over time. For example, I might have inconsistent contacts with a friend that I've known for a long time because of reasons, but if they're having a rough time I will probably be more attentive and want to contact them more frequently.
- Relationships are two-way, so you'd expect that the other part initiates contact a significant amount of the times. Given the myriad of ways that contact can happen, updating the database for hundreds of people can be a real hassle. The fact that this is not mentioned at all indicates that a lot of these might be one-way relationships, not actual friendships.
- I find it really really hard to write non-artificial messages when contacting on a schedule. Maybe the first one can be believable, but the second or third time you contact someone without any obvious trigger, it starts to feel weird. I think most people would catch wind that the other person is not contacting organically but on some kind of schedule, and I guess it could make them feel really weird about it: "This person doesn't really think of me, doesn't see any of my social media/blog/whatever updates... why are they contacting me?"
I understand what other people are saying in the comments about forgetting to contact people or being too busy, and needing reminders. But I don't think that's the same problem the author is solving.
> I find it really really hard to write non-artificial messages when contacting on a schedule. Maybe the first one can be believable, but the second or third time you contact someone without any obvious trigger, it starts to feel weird. I think most people would catch wind that the other person is not contacting organically but on some kind of schedule, and I guess it could make them feel really weird about it: "This person doesn't really think of me, doesn't see any of my social media/blog/whatever updates... why are they contacting me?"
You, obviously, SHOULD try to read blog/twitter/whatever BEFORE contacting that person, try to find something interesting there and talk about it. Or check notes about person's interests and bring up something you recently saw/heard, that is related to their interests. I doubt that nothing interesting happened to person in three months that you hadn't spoke with them, so you have something to talk about. And some people don't use social media, and asking about their wellbeing is completely normal.
Seems both fair and reasonable, but IME it's wrong.
It's wrong in a way that is stable as well, and that is why it takes effort to fight: people easily get anxious about rejection, and they easily get it in their heads that the other person doesn't want to hear from them. Anything from "we had a bad interaction" to "they didn't reply last time" seems to be an excuse to cut contact.
According to (probably dubious) tests, I'm not especially extroverted or introverted. But I make conscious effort to keep contacts alive, because I just like the human contact and keeping updated on people's stories.
It's also the case that people like to help, and will do so readily if you reach out to them, which is another weird hold-up in people's minds (can I ask this person that I kinda know about this thing? 90% of the time, yes). Just this week I reached out to people who were my primary school teachers for some advice, I kid you not. Now do I talk much to these ladies that I knew 30 years ago? No. Now and again I'll send out a short piece about how my family is doing, and that's it. But even if they read it and don't reply, chances are they appreciate it. Kinda like TCP, you can have an open connection even though nothing is sent over it.
Another case is that friend who sucks at staying in touch. I have a number of friends who are super warm and chummy when I'm near them, but they never take it upon themselves to initiate anything. Think about when you were a kid, how many people did you hang out with, vs how many people bothered to organize parties? It's like 50 and 4. So a lot of people will just wait for an invite, and they'll get enough that they don't need to do anything.
As for the logistics, I don't have a custom program to do it for me, it's just a Trello, plus FB and LinkedIn that I scan from time to time. FB tells me birthdays, so that is a good time to write a DM. LinkedIn tells me when they changed jobs, which is also a good time to update. And then Trello because not everyone is active on the other two. I'll also do a quick scan if I'm travelling, in case someone I know is at the destination, and I'll send out some emails at Christmas/NY.
If anyone reading this builds software like this, and releases it publicly, whether free or for sale, please let me know. I'd be happy to send people your way.
Because of https://sive.rs/dbt I get a few emails a week from strangers, asking if my software is public yet, or if not, what else I would recommend. (And I might never make my software public. It's too tied-in to my now-complex PostgreSQL system of everything.)
I'm definitely going to send people to Jakob's post here now. But if interested in this subject, please email me here:
https://sive.rs/contact
My implementation of your system is just a bunch of markdown files. The title of the file is a friend's name, the frontmatter at the top keeps info about them that doesn't change too often (ex: birthday, address, kids names), and each time I chat with them I add a section with an H1 title that's the date we chatted (ex: "# 2022-02-14\n"). My notes about the chat go under that heading.
Based off of that structure I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts:
- print out a list of upcoming birthdays, half birthdays, birthdays on Jupiter, etc. of all my friends - print out a list of friends I haven't contacted within my desired `frequency` (the subject of this post) - create or open the friend file containing a particular name from the command line (ex: `,people Sarah` prints out all the Sarah files I have and asks me which I'd like to open)
I think plain text is the way to go with something as personal as a system for keeping track of your friends. I was inspired to go this route by your post on journaling[1]:
> If digital, use only plain text. It’s a standard format not owned by any company. It will be readable in 50 years on devices we haven’t even imagined yet. Don’t use formats that can only be read by one program, because that program won’t be around in 50 years. Don’t use the cloud, unless you’re also going to download it weekly and back it up in plain text outside that cloud. (Companies shut down. Clouds disappear. Think long-term.)
I've been chewing on how to make this system something that might be used by other people who don't know how to use the command line. Something like the way Obsidian[2] works might make sense.
1. https://sive.rs/dj
2. https://obsidian.md/
In 25+ years of keeping people in my database, and writing plain text all day, I'd never once considered keeping my list of people in plain text files.
Thanks for the description and inspiration.
https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/
I mention it because it doesn't get the attention that it deserves, as a format midway between relational data in database and plain-old-text.
>> If digital, use only plain text. It’s a standard format not owned by any company.
This is fine for anything where you don't care about the computer processing your data (e.g. a journal where you don't care about tagging or sorting by date or whatever), but it sounds like you do (based on "Based off of that structure I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts"), so:
"Plain text" is mutually exclusive with machine-parsing, because "plain text" is not a format. If I create a text file for each of my friends, and somewhere in each file is an English-language description of my friend's name, then that is both (a) plain-text and (b) not machine-parseable at all.
A "format" is necessarily structured - something like "each line of this file represents a "row", which is divided into "fields" by commas". But then you don't have a plain-text file - you have CSV, or JSON, or something that's a subset of "plain text file", but is still a structured, machine-parseable format.
Even if you do what I did and create your own ad-hoc format like "text files are broken into "blobs", where each blob is separated from others by a blank line, and has a header consisting of the blob name..." - that's still not plain text. You've still invented your own structured-object-embedded-in-text format - except that because you aren't using JSON or XML or CSV, you're incompatible with every tool in existence, and have to write tools to parse, lint, generate, and process these files yourself.
(and, hence, it's not a "standard format" - each ad-hoc plain-text-embedded format is different, except for the ones that are either accidentally exactly the same, or the ones that are standardized and have names - at which point plain-text purists claim that they're no longer plain-text)
You use Markdown - which means that you have all of the problems above, because Markdown encodes formatting, not structure. You even alluded to it yourself - you say that "...I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts" because you had to write those scripts to handle your own custom format, instead of just using JSON and writing data["first-name"] in Python.
It's your system, so you can do what you want - just don't fool yourself (or others) into believing that you're saving effort, because you're not - you're just reinventing a wheel that has been reinvented millions of times before.
(this isn't meant to be a random rant - I'm currently in the middle of rewriting my own system from using my own custom, ad-hoc structured text format to using s-expressions and typed objects. there's hundreds of thousands of objects spanning thousands of files, and the process is absolutely miserable - I want to save as many other people from having to go through this as I can)
It'll eventually be up on gosayhito.com. I'll try to remind you when it's done, but you can also probably put the website in as a monthly thing to check on.
On the other hand, calling someone you don't know well (even someone you do know!) feels even weirder and more invasive those days. I don't remember when I last called someone else than my close family (and very close friends upon first fixing a date/time for the call).
It works for the groups of friends that we have active WhatsApp groups with. But especially texting friends of the opposite sex - now that we're grown up, married, etc - just feels invasive, unless it's asking a specific question, or to arrange something.
If anyone has figured out a pretext or mental framework for warming up conversations that have effectively died long ago, I would be delighted to know about it.
In any case, I find it's easier (and emotionally satisfying) to stay in touch with a couple people that I can have natural, unforced conversations with. Scheduling interactions on a calendar feels odd. It makes me think of those emails you get "from" somebody after signing up for a service, and after a few you notice their time stamps all end in 00:00.
Perfect summary. The people I'm still in contact with are those that grew into better people together with me.
Everyone else is someone who can come and go. How long are they around for? Who knows, it's just a temporary crossing of paths that feels nice while it lasts. I couldn't maintain a connect with hundreds of people unless fate crossed our paths again.
But, you know, even those deep connections might be temporary, just on a longer timeframe. If one connection faded then perhaps there'd be room for a new one.
Something I need to get back into. Interacting, at least casually, on a routine basis with a wide amount of people has lead to every job I have ever held - they came to me based on my reputation or past interactions. It's definitely the best way to get a new (and better) job rather than blindly fishing for them.
That's the real power of systems like this. Not to develop personal friendships, but to remain relevant in the eyes of a large number of people so that if they have a future opportunity you will be top of mind for how they can get it addressed.
I think it's why he stresses making the contacts personal and with meaning/value specific to that person. These aren't soulless automated computer generated emails, but a system to prompt him to write relevant and sincere contact messages.
Is it a lot of work? Sure. But building up a network of people who see you as contributing value is priceless.
I feel the same. In fact, I intentionally avoid interacting with people from my past since they may have bad memories involving me that I'd be resurfacing by contacting them. I've considered reaching out to certain people to apologize, but I stopped when I realized I was mostly just looking for absolution rather than actually trying to make them feel better. To me, the kindest thing I can do is stay out of their lives.
I consider this to be a bad trait, because finding new friends isn't easy and I'm trying to get rid of this habit.
Nothing prevents you from talking to these people more frequently, this system seems more like a way to nudge you to remind you about conversations you forgot.
The obvious explanation would be fear of rejection.
Another story you could tell is fear of connection due to opportunity cost -- what if, among all the people you could connect with, this one isn't a great choice but will end up consuming a lot of your time?
But I think it's probably the first.
What I've learned in the last five years is contacting people has more upside than not contacting them.
The worst thing that can happen after contact is a return to disconnection and the other person maintaining the same opinion.
I've resumed chatting with some people this way (even though they didn't feel there was a need)
Well I definitely heard that. I have a thing the voices in my head periodically inflict on me that I call Embarrassment Day, where I spend the day remembering past incidents that I'm embarrassed about. Lots of fun.
The silver lining of course is that if you're embarrassed about things in the past, it means you've grown enough since then to be embarrassed about them. If all you want to do is double down on everything you did, either you were already perfect or you haven't grown at all since then.
> You’d be surprised how many people are really happy to get these kinds of messages and they often spark all kinds of deeper conversations.
I had an acquaintance I barely had any common interests with that every few weeks out of the blue would ask me "what's up?". Not once did it lead to any value for me or him and just mildly annoyed me and made me less likely to cooperate if he ever needed help. I'd still help him, because I'm a helpful person but I'd have more mixed feelings about it than if he was just memory of last pleasant interaction from few years prior than fresh memory of scheduled networking/nagging.
I think if you can't personalize approach to provide value to that person with your interactions you should skip keeping in touch because you might be worse off.
Anyway, as if his ears were burning, he actually sent me a "what's up?" text about 5 minutes ago (first time in a year). So I had to come back here and comment because the timing was just too perfect :)
Clearly, this acquaintance of yours is not taking your lack of response into account. Or, they're just trying to get closer to you and you might be reading their message as inpersonal when it is actually genuine. Anyway, I can't see myself sending multiple messages per month to someone who never answers back.
I live overseas from loved ones and old friends, meaning there are few natural cues to encourage communication. Without very regular chats my memory doesn't let me be as in context with the major things happening in their lives as I need to be to have meaningful conversations with them. Monica helps with both of these things.
Getting reminders only really helps if the interactions themselves are also rewarding when you do them. If, say, calling an elderly family member feels more like a chore, it's easy to end up skipping the reminders more than you'd like.
I hop between a lot of projects and hobbies so I tend to be a bit scatterbrained. Having a central store of my contacts, past events, their likes/dislikes is extremely useful for me.