Never Eat Alone suggests making a list to group people according to contact frequencies. Although the book recommends to stick to simple technology like pencil and paper, I still want a specialised software and I found monica.
Monica (official site) calls itself a Persoal Relationship Management (PRM) software。On the other hand, Customer Relationship Management（CRM）is for people in the business sector to mangement their customer profiles (Never eat alone is a bit business-oriented at the outset). I think it’s beneficial to go the extra mile and put the same amount of effort to manage our own networks. Monica is open-source. You can run it on local server using the docker image they provide.
It looks promising but after trying it, it doesn’t enphasise enough on the features that I most needed, which is to remind me to keep in touch with people. Email notification is not going to work (and I don’t have a email server for now). The tagging and sorting functions are not very handy, while the handy event reminder panel can be replaced by other calendar software. It’s usable, but there should be some simpler tools that satisfy my needs. Maybe just pure text files.
The devs are working on a revised version called Chandler (monicahq.com). See how it goes.
It’s not necessary to spend a lot of time maintaining relationships. You don’t need to dedicate hours—all you need is to contact your friends at a stable frequency. More importantly, you have to genuinely want to reach out to them. Unfortunately, this is what I lack.
No tools can incentivise me to do this. All I can do for now is to keep records.
Acutually, I’ve been using Track & Graph to record things for me, although it’s not specialised for this.