The Work/Life Relationship Advice No One Will Give You

Now that we’ve covered understanding the way knowledge works, we’re going to introduce how you can build better relationships in your personal and professional spheres. We’ll talk about personal relationship management — what it is, why it’s essential, and how you can build one.

Remember that moment when you delayed sending a gift and then it was too late? Or when you wanted to connect to a contact because you had a business idea they’d love? How about that time when you wanted to organize all your personal contacts but failed to keep them up to date? We’ve all been there. A potential solution? Personal CRMs.

Personal CRM — also known as ‘Personal Relationship Management’, is a method of managing and maintaining your personal relationships effectively for the long term. With a CRM tool in your personal toolkit, you’ll be able to efficiently manage relationships, summarize self-collected data points, and take away personalized insights for your social life.

If you feel like you’re struggling with this… Remember: everyone is, too

Organizing our personal lives can sometimes feel like attempting to single out each ingredient from a slice of pie: a mess. Dropping personal connections into distinguishable categories doesn’t come as easily as plugging in “Email” beside “Name,” or whatever rote practice your job requires of you, does it?

A disorganized personal life can bring stress to relationships. Photo by Freepik.

So how can you build a Personal CRM?

More people than you know actually keep a spreadsheet of relationships in their lives. It’s something we use more as an organizational or effective planning tool, rather than as a means to quantify our friendships. Building a personal CRM starts first with taking stock of your relationships. By first being aware of who you’re connected to, you can begin creating systems to translate how you organize them in your mind into a system.

Instead of leaving you with a five-step process, we’ll leave you with a nugget that will help frame your organization process: understanding how you organize your relationships in your mind can help you create your own, effective tool to manage them.

If you prefer to be digitally savvy, you could also look up “Personal CRM” or “Relationship Management Tool” under Productivity in your App Store, but we’ll leave you to determine which one works for you.

The first step is being aware of who is in your network before organizing them.

How can you maximize your Personal CRM?

Simply put, a Personal CRM manages any and all kinds of relationships: from dating, to friendships, to networking. With it, you can maintain interactions, manage workflows, and expand your professional network powerfully.

The categorization possibilities are limitless. That’s because our relationships and knowledge of them can only make sense to us. Nobody else can understand these relationships as intimately as you would. So we can create tags like “huggability,” and “likelihood of understanding,” which wouldn’t make sense in an external context. By personalizing your organization, we get one step closer to building a personal CRM that actually works for you, rather than against you.

Here at Weavit, we’re building a tool that could act as your personal CRM. We’re here tol organize and filter your relationships with people, companies, events and more so that you can use this categorization to your advantage. Whether you are a marketing professional, recruiter, entrepreneur or not, the fact of the matter is that our connections are increasing at the speed of light (maybe not that quickly, but they are growing fast!). If we want better relationships, we will need to maintain those connections one way or another.

The definitions are endless…

Some say that a personal CRM integrates an address book, a day planner, a calendar, and event manager tailored to your life. Others describe it as “helping you stay attentive [and] keep track of friends, family and colleagues you care for.” How would you describe it?

Have you created a personal CRM before? Are there other ways you’ve managed your relationships? Leave a comment or thought below!

This article was written by the team at Weavit — for more information on the exciting product we’re building: check out our website here. If you’d like to get in touch to chat or join our team — reach out at hello@weavit.ai

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