How to keep up with your network when you work 80 hours per week
Whether you are working for a fast pace startup or are consulting for clients all over the world, staying in touch with your friends and all the other smart people you’ve met in your life is a priority to you. The only issue is that you struggle to do so because you have a lot going on in your life, here is how to:
The easy solution (that doesn’t work)
Your random work colleague will tell you: « Just do as you’ve always done ». But the reality is that the current method is not working. You can sometimes spend weeks focusing on work without doing anything else (which is great by the way!). The only issue is that this affects your ability to build long lasting friendships (and relationships). Working hardcore and reaching out to friends once you finished a project and being like: « hey, what have you been up to? », doesn’t work.
How relationships work
Building relationships is in itself quite close to building a business: you need to invest.
The great thing though is that you only need to invest time (the catch being that this is what you lack the most). Similarly to a business, building relationships require an ongoing amount of time: You cannot call someone once every 60 days, even if you spend 4 hours on the phone every time! (unless you’ve built a strong relationship in the past)
This is not how you build a strong relationship. You need recurring interactions that involve time and at least some thinking on your side. The good news is, it’s easy if you have the right tools.
The magical formula to relationships:
- Being personal
- Regular interactions
It’s that easy.
Being personal
When you are really busy, being personal and actually connecting with the other person is a challenge in itself. Simply bulk sending some « hey how are you? » and not following up as some of us do won’t get you anywhere. Here are some tips to help you build real connections:
Take notes about your friends
He told you he likes Japanese culture? Write it down. He in vegetarian? Write it down. You’ve met in a particular place? Write it down. You need to be careful with trusting your memory too much. It’s easy to forget and simply taking some notes that you can read through before your next interaction always helps to be personal.
Take & share pictures
Talking about memory, pictures are an incredible way to share a memory with someone. Whenever you are with someone, try to take a picture (of the location, of both of you or anything remarkable that you saw while being together). You’ll be able to send him the picture some time later and he’ll instantly remember that day you spent together. Generally speaking, sending pictures on a private channel (WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS, …) is something very powerful.
The basics
Birthdays. It’s so powerful to send someone a personal message for his birthday on a private channel. Please don’t send a « HB » on his Facebook wall (also avoid sending a personal birthday message on Facebook as it’s too obvious that you got the notification from FB).
Be vulnerable & honest
You had a really good day? Achieved something great? You don’t have to brag about it but telling some people that you are very happy to have achieved X will make them feel very happy for you and proud that you shared something like this with them.
Bonus: Sharing articles
It’s actually a very good way to impress your network and add value to their day. Did you read something really insightful? Share the article with some friends and they’ll be proud that you took some time to share it with them.
Regular interactions
The perfect interval for reaching out doesn’t exist. It depends on what type of relationship you want to achieve. For someone you want to stay connected with but without being actually close, every two weeks is a good start and for someone you want to be very close with, once every 4–5 days is the best. There are different tactics that I’ve seen over the years: some use excel spreadsheet, some have calendar reminders but most struggle :/
I’m actually building an app to help people like you to stay in touch with their network. If you are interested, I would love you to sign up here.
Thank you very much! ❤
