Why I Built a Personal CRM
During my annual end-of-year reflections, one of the tactics I use to summarize my year, is to go through my Google Calendar — this refreshes my memory on trips that I went on, events that I attended, and people that I met.
This year in particular, as I thought about new people that I met (read: acquaintances), I realized that I really enjoyed most of those conversations; but unfortunately, due to life happening, we never had any follow up conversations, and had slowly forgotten about the conversation (out of sight, out of mind).
This frustrated me, and led me into wanting to build a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for friends and acquaintances. For a short time period, I coined this concept as Friends & Acquaintance Relationship Management (FARM), until I learned about the industry standard name: Personal CRM.
I floated the FARM and Personal CRM concept around to a few of my friends during the break, and the overwhelming response from them was “Wow, that sounds very impersonal” and “If you really cared about those people, then you wouldn’t need a system to reconnect”.
I stepped back to think to myself about whether I had actually gone too far into the machine realm, such that I forgot my human element? Very quickly I discarded that thought, and went ahead to build my own Personal CRM for a few reasons:
- Human memory has biological limitations: we are dynamic creatures, and there is a seemingly endless list of things that we need to remember. Because this limitation is well acknowledged, technology-based tools such as Todoist, Evernote, and Google Calendar already exist so we don’t forget out our tasks, notes, and meetings. The same logic can be applied to leverage technology-based tools to manage relationships with friends and acquaintances.
- The list of people will only increase: the longer we live, the more people we are inevitably going to interact with. This cumulative list may be manageable for now, but will hit an inflection point very soon, and the biological limitation mentioned above will come into effect. I would want to recall person #100 I met, even though I am now meeting person #500.
- Regardless of system, I am achieving the desired outcome: granted, if I was able to manage all of the relationships off by memory, it would be perceived as more personal. However, I wholeheartedly believe in the “done is better than perfect” motto. I would rather use tools to support my shortcomings to attain the objective of reconnecting with people, than worry about implementing the perfect system which seems personable.
The Personal CRM has been working fabulously for me so far. I have managed to rekindle old relationships, without adding mental load on myself.
How do you keep old relationships alive? Do you have a system? Please share!
