Networking and keeping track of my contacts has always been hard for me. Other than the occasional guilty feeling at forgetting someone’s birthday or sending late Christmas cards, it was never a big deal before February. However, after I moved to China, I realized that I had no friends here, no one to go talk to about tech, and because I was working at home every day, I wasn’t meeting anyone. On top of that, when I did meet new people, I was very bad at following up with them – maybe because I felt it would be awkward to offer to hang out with someone I didn’t really know yet.
For a while, I became fairly depressed, but eventually I realized that I was going to have to get over these feelings and go find some friends of my own or else I was going to go crazy. I knew there must be a way, because every day I could see how easily my girlfriend was able to make new friends and very quickly start a meaningful relationship with them.
One of the big skills my girlfriend has that I lack is that she always knows who to call on any given day. She instinctively knows how long to wait between contacts for friends vs. business contacts, and she can remember for whom it’s been too long. I don’t know if my brain is just different from hers, but I find that requires a lot of effort. If I haven’t seen someone for a long time, I’m probably less likely to think of hanging out with them, not more likely…
Luckily, I’m an analytical programmer, so I can use a computer to do this thinking for me. I made myself a spreadsheet that keeps track of my contacts and calculates when the next that I should reach out to each of them is. Every person can have their own period of time that I should wait, so if someone’s a good friend, I can remember them every three weeks, but if someone just needs an update every once in a while, I can send them an email every three months and be ok. I now check this every week to see who I should get in touch with. For example, this week, I need to email my friend Jason and see how he’s doing in Boston.
After using this for a while, I feel much more confident about getting more people in my network and not worrying that I’ll lose track of them. I can safely say that I’ve made more new friends in the last month than in the first five months I was in Beijing.
I actually think this would be a fun web app to build. Would anyone else be interested in getting an email every Monday that reminds you who you should be in touch with this week? If there’s a positive response, I’ll take a few days and build an MVP for this and send everyone an invite.
