A Free Personal Relationship Manager
March 11, 2023 12:43 PM Subscribe
So there's a commercial social app out there that claims to help you manage your personal relationships using AI. The marketing is compelling. What I am looking for is even simpler, and potentially free: I want a methodology or app or something that will gently nudge me to reach out to friends I haven't talked to for, say, six months or so. In a sense, it would be the social equivalent of the spaced repetition algorithm employed by flashcard apps.
- I realize that maybe there's a reason we lose touch with people, and it's ok to do so.
- Maybe I should go read Judith Vorst's "Necessary Losses"
- This may just be me expressing a fear of death
- However, if I can set up a system to stay in contact with friends, it will be that much easier to leave Facebook.
- I don't miss anyone from high school, and it's not the end of the world
- Maybe I'll just make a flashcard deck with friends on each card and review it once a week.
There are a million ways to do set recurring reminders with tech. This is the equivalent of asking if digital technology in the late 90s came with a built-in calculator.
On the iphone there is a built-in app called reminders. Google will send you notifications with google calendar. Etc. Do you have a preference for desktop or smartphone, apple, google, or FLOSS?
In my opinion, option #6 is the way to go. Call one person (or however many) each week so that you cycle through everyone however often.
posted by aniola at 1:19 PM on March 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
On the iphone there is a built-in app called reminders. Google will send you notifications with google calendar. Etc. Do you have a preference for desktop or smartphone, apple, google, or FLOSS?
In my opinion, option #6 is the way to go. Call one person (or however many) each week so that you cycle through everyone however often.
posted by aniola at 1:19 PM on March 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
Response by poster: Using language you all supplied, I came across this:
5 Free Personal CRM Apps That Help Maintain Healthy Relationships Note that most of these make you pay for the premium flavors.
I could label all of my Google contacts with something like "three month, six month, annual" and put in recurring calendar reminders to contact each group at different intervals.
posted by mecran01 at 1:42 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
5 Free Personal CRM Apps That Help Maintain Healthy Relationships Note that most of these make you pay for the premium flavors.
I could label all of my Google contacts with something like "three month, six month, annual" and put in recurring calendar reminders to contact each group at different intervals.
posted by mecran01 at 1:42 PM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
Most of the reminder apps let you set recurring reminders. The one i use (a free app on my iPhone called Alarmed) lets you pick if you want the next reminder set based on the date you got reminded of the last one or the date that you checked it as done.
I would suggest having a different reminder set up for the each friend and the reminder set to auto-repeat based on when you last had contact (So, remind me again 30 days after I checked that I last connected with them instead of remind me on the 15th of every month.) That way, you can get a mix of frequent and less frequent friends showing up in the your reminders each week. I think if you do it as a whole group of reminders showing up in a batch it will be more intimidating plus it won't account for the different pace of how long it takes to make contact with any given person.
posted by metahawk at 2:22 PM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I would suggest having a different reminder set up for the each friend and the reminder set to auto-repeat based on when you last had contact (So, remind me again 30 days after I checked that I last connected with them instead of remind me on the 15th of every month.) That way, you can get a mix of frequent and less frequent friends showing up in the your reminders each week. I think if you do it as a whole group of reminders showing up in a batch it will be more intimidating plus it won't account for the different pace of how long it takes to make contact with any given person.
posted by metahawk at 2:22 PM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]
I use an app called Fabriq to do this and I really like it.
posted by Jess the Mess at 6:54 PM on March 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Jess the Mess at 6:54 PM on March 11, 2023 [3 favorites]
sounds like you are finding what you want!
I'm just jumping in to say I also don't miss anyone from high school. It's fine. I have lots of friends, a great social network and there are no people from high school in it. And high school wasn't even that bad! It just didn't put me in touch with anybody who ended up being a kindred spirit, I found my people later.
posted by Jenny'sCricket at 1:18 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm just jumping in to say I also don't miss anyone from high school. It's fine. I have lots of friends, a great social network and there are no people from high school in it. And high school wasn't even that bad! It just didn't put me in touch with anybody who ended up being a kindred spirit, I found my people later.
posted by Jenny'sCricket at 1:18 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
I use the previously mentioned Monica for this, for both personal reminders and my freelance work contacts. Monica also acts as the server for syncing my contacts between devices.
Every other "CRM" type software I looked at was really complicated & sales focused.
posted by bradbane at 9:50 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
Every other "CRM" type software I looked at was really complicated & sales focused.
posted by bradbane at 9:50 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
I just wanted to thank aniola and bradbane for talking about Monica. I just finally got it working on my local server and wow--I've wanted something like this for *years*.
I tried building something like it in Notion which was just too clunky to work with. This is so nice!
posted by JDHarper at 8:18 PM on March 16, 2023
I tried building something like it in Notion which was just too clunky to work with. This is so nice!
posted by JDHarper at 8:18 PM on March 16, 2023
It was BungaDunga, but yay for discovering a program you've wanted for years!
posted by aniola at 8:34 PM on March 16, 2023
posted by aniola at 8:34 PM on March 16, 2023
This thread is closed to new comments.
The term for this seems to be "personal CRM" and there are a few out there, I'm not sure there are any that are Actually Free (other than Monica, which again is free-if-you're-techy)
posted by BungaDunga at 1:14 PM on March 11, 2023 [3 favorites]