Contact reminders for power connectors

Disclaimer: Lots of people immediately try to use this spreadsheet in Google Sheets, but I consider real Excel a hard requirement. What bubbles people up is a complex pre-defined sort. Excel has a shortcut key to re-run such a sort, and Google Sheets does not. Without the shortcut key, I find the user experience unacceptable.

If you know me and you've heard "you've bubbled up in my little system" - here is that little system.

At the time of writing, I can prove that I've talked to all 178 people in my "tribe" in the last 16 weeks. I've maintained such a fact on a perpetual and rolling basis for about three years. If this level of care for relationships inspires you, it's in your power to get there, too, with the help of power_circles.xlsx maintained here.

In the pre-industrial age, with your tribe all in close physical proximity, memory and random encounters were enough to stay current with your tribe. In the industrial age, with relationships spanning great distance and pandemics limiting proximity, these tools are inadequate. Human cognition is simply bad at noticing who isn't there. Memory alone allows far too many people at the periphery of your tribe to fade into disconnection, causing your world to implode into social isolation. If you rely on social media, you're pulled into too many connections of too low a quality, sorted badly. Social media gives the most headspace to the smuggest, neediest, or most controversial acquaintances (who sell engagement and ads) instead of the most generous or reliable.

Judy Robinett argues that the heart of "networking" or "strategic relationship management" is the following workflow:

• Identify your tribe: all significant interpersonal relationships encompassing family, friendship, work, community, etc. Its size will roughly be Dunbar's number (100-250, nominally ~150).
• Divide this tribe into a few "power circles" or frequency tiers (Robinett suggests three tiers: 5 + 50 + 100 = 155).
• Commit to a frequency of contact for each power circle (Robinett suggests being in touch with each of the 5 daily, each of the 50 weekly, and each of the 100 monthly) and reach out to add value to these people at least this often.
• Continually upgrade these power circles as you meet worthwhile new people and others inevitably roll off.

This workbook (built with Excel for Mac 2019 but backward-compatible to Excel 2003) operationalizes this proposal. It provides a place to maintain a list of people, each person's place in one's power circles, and when and how you last contacted them. This is deliberately much less information than you'd store in "personal CRM" apps available elsewhere. It generates reliable contact reminders at a glance when "it has been too long" with someone you care about.

Robinett's recommendations add up to a baseline of adding value to ~15 different people in one's power circles every day, 365 days a year. I don't consider this realistic for people with an occupation other than "full-time networker." This spreadsheet's defaults for the sizes and frequencies of the tiers dial these parameters down a great deal while staying true to Robinett's basic structure of a few frequency tiers addding up to Dunbar's number:

• The default power circle sizes are 5 + 25 + 120 = 150.
• The spreadsheet suggests being in touch with each of the 5 weekly, each of the 25 every 4 weeks, and each of the 120 every 16 weeks. This adds up to a handful of people every day. (5/7 + 25/28 + 120/112 = 2.68, but the number of people you communicate with on an average day will be higher. You will often connect with people spontaneously before they've fallen to 0% recency in the spreadsheet, and asynchronous conversations like email threads often span many days.)

I've found this reduced intensity to be sustainable in lieu of being routinely on social media: it consumes similar time and emotional energy but with far richer rewards. The frequency of contact enforced by this system keeps friendships warm even in isolating life circumstances, such as in COVID times as a serial transplant with many young parents for friends. It also helps independents like me keep a professional network healthy even when busy (e.g., when deep in a client project).

Initial setup

1. In place of the fake data in the power_circles sheet, under the columns first_name, last_name, last_contacted, and description, assemble a list of all the people you've been in touch with in the recent past and when and how you were in contact with them. I wrote some little scripts (unpublished) to merge names from social media data exports, cell phone contacts, etc., but regardless of automation, this is a lot of clerical effort given how many ways (including analog in-person conversations) people connect in practice. I ended up with 1300-1400 names; the latter two fields were unknown for most of them.
2. Start everyone at a tier of 0.
3. Make a pass through everyone. When you see a relationship that feels warm (or that deserves effort to get to warm), assign them an appropriate tier (1, 2, or 3; 3 is the warmest) depending on how close they are. This large number of emotional judgment calls is also a lot of effort.
4. Use Excel's "custom sort" to sort people by tier, then by last contacted, then by last name. This custom sort has been saved in this spreadsheet. You can pull it up using Alt + A + S + S on Excel 365 (Cmd-Shift-R on my 2019 Excel for Mac). You'll use this custom sort all of the time in this spreadsheet.
5. Massage these tier labels until their sizes are reasonably in line with the above guidance. They don't have to be exact (at the time of writing my power circles are 2 + 14 + 162 = 178).
6. Set up the maximum days between contacts you'd like to commit to for these tiers, and enter them in the tiers sheet.
7. You'll probably find that you're in the red at first with a lot of the people in your tier 1. Perform outreach at a sustainable pace, 1-2 people per day, until the red is gone.

Maintenance of your power circles

1. Every day, enter the date and description of your interactions with everyone in your power circles. The Ctrl-; shortcut key for today's date is key here. It's key to take credit for everyone you interacted with, not just the people who bubbled up. Resetting the clock on spontaneous encounters is what makes the system tractable and reliable.
2. Continually apply the Alt + A + S + S/Cmd-Shift-R custom sort to tidy up the list and review who has "bubbled up" to the top of the spreadsheet.
3. Typically, socially intense events (weddings, deaths, conferences, reunions) will refresh a lot of connections at the periphery of your tribe. A clump of these tier 1 people will then bubble up 16 weeks later. To mitigate the stress of this, it's helpful to routinely be steady in reaching out to 1-2 people who have bubbled up each day, building up a margin so you can gradually work through clumps that bubble up.
4. Use the average_recency sheet to monitor things. The aforementioned clumps organize themselves, bubble upward, and smooth out over multiple 16-week cycles. You may occasionally get slammed with other obligations and spend less time on relationships. The average recency provides a crude measurement of all this. My average recency fluctuates in the 57-68% range; steady is good.
5. Add, remove, promote, and demote people from your power circles as they become relevant, ghost you, etc., by adding rows or adjusting tier labels.