Life is better with friends and connections. And lots of research shows the more people you know, the more opportunities you get to advance in life.
Having a great social life is all about balancing relationships. You want to have a few people in your life you can always count on—your closest connections—and as many “loose connections” as possible.
Of course, it’s a lot of work to build and maintain all those connections. That’s why I created a system to make it easier for myself. It helps me keep up with all the people I want in my life but I might not see on a regular basis.
I call it the “Friends Game” and the concept is simple. You keep a database of the people you want to stay in touch with, decide how often you want to stay in touch with them, and set up automatic triggers to remind you when it’s time to reach out.
There are lots of ways to do this. You could load people into your calendar with recurring events. You could use a to do list on your app and set deadlines for different people. Or you could create a simple spreadsheet that you update when you connect with someone.
My favorite way to do it, though, is to use an app called Trello. I create a board with 12 lists—one for each month of the year. At the beginning of year, all my friends and important connections go in the “January” list.
Then, throughout the year, I make my best effort to get everyone into the current month. I move them there as I reconnect with them.
Of course, life happens and I’m never perfect so, after a few months, my list ends up looking more like this:
That’s a great visual representation of who I haven’t done a great job staying in touch with recently. I just go to the month furthest back, and start with the people there.
It’s okay if you find that you have a lot of people left behind. You’re not expected to stay in touch with everyone you know every month. It’s not realistic. This way, though, no one falls through the cracks for too long.
Of course, when you haven’t talked to someone in a while, it can be hard to figure out how to break the ice again. That’s why, each time I chat with someone, I leave a brief note to remind myself of what’s going on in their lives:
That makes it really easy to fire off an email saying hi and asking how specific things have been going. And it makes it easier for them to respond to as well—you gave them a topic or two to focus on instead of a generic, “Hey, how are things going?” And that makes it easier to keep the momentum of the relationship up.
And that’s basically it. A simple system for keeping tabs on the people who matter to you without doing much work at all.
Give it a shot. Don’t worry about being perfect or keeping up with everyone all the time. It won’t take long to see how keeping yourself connected with people improves the opportunities that come your way.
End note: Sometimes you’ll find you don’t keep up with someone at all even though they’re in the system and you feel like you should. That’s okay, too.
You’re welcome to remove them if you just don’t feel like keeping up with them. And you don’t need to feel bad about it, either. Life will go on for both of you.