Help me manage my people collection.

Naberius — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:38:22 -0800

I seem to have a very particular social skills deficit. Can you suggest software that might serve as a kind of brain prosthetic for me? I like people - I really do. But I'm an introvert. And, for lack of a better word, I just lose people if they don't get in my face on a regular basis. I want to maintain relationships, but I just lose track of people and before I know it months have gone by and the friendship has atrophied. A lot of my interactions with friends are sort of "yeah, sorry I haven't been in touch, how are things going with you? I'll try to be better about that." Over and over again.

Also I'm in a field where the ability to network is quite important and because of this particular issue, I really suck at it. Basically I seem to be able to keep up with only a very small inner circle of friends - smaller than most people's - and everyone else drops off into that outer circle of contacts or acquaintances, whether I want them to or not. Sometimes they are hurt. More often they just realize they're having to put in most of the work to keep the connection running, while I'm not really holding up my end, and they let things drift off.

Its occurred to me to wonder about contact management applications like ACT. I gather salespeople use them to manage social connections with more people than our primate brains could normally deal with. But I don't really know much about them. What do they actually do? Would they be useful for me? Or perhaps there's some other kind of application that could basically keep a database of people I know, track how long it's been since I did something to keep that particular plate spinning and prod me to give so and so a call or an email or something? What would you suggest?

Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with try

Help me manage my people collection.