When you are busy, its easy to forget to keep in touch with friends and family who you don’t see on a day to day basis. Perhaps they live far away, or so close you feel you could get in touch with them at any moment, but always forget. Perhaps you see certain people a lot, and others less so. Mark Kirby asks whether there might be a better way to create more balance and spread the love!
Too busy to keep in touch?
If you let your work take over, and fail to keep up these connections, you may find it very difficult if things go wrong. People won’t be so keen to help you out if you haven’t been in touch in ages and suddenly appear out of the blue asking for help.
Keeping in touch with people can also lead to more work. Keep old friends up to date with what your working on and you will be more likely to spring to mind when someone asks them if they know someone who specialises in your skill.
The solution – apply a structured approach to contacting people
I found a great method which reminds me to keep in touch with people. You can use any tool with a facility for sending a regular reminder, but I use Remember the milk.
Read Mark’s introduction to the joys of Remember the Milk.
Step 1 – think of all the people you want to keep in touch with and make a list
Think of everyone you think would appreciate a call, email or visit every once in a while, old friends and family members would fall into this category.
Think of acquaintances and casual friends that might not mind if you forget to get in touch, but would be worth building relationships with to ensure you don’t miss out on possible opportunities.
Finally, work through your contact list, is there anyone you’ve missed? Perhaps there is a good reason they didn’t spring to mind before! Be careful not to add too many people – keeping in touch will take time.
Step 2 – for each person, think about how often you want to contact them
You don’t want to be calling people every week, you have to prioritise certain people so you don’t spend too much time on this. Go through each list and think about how often you would like to contact them and how. For each method of contact, set a time span.
For example, my Dad lives reasonably far away, so I make sure I contact him once a week, and see him face to face four times a year. A have a friend named John who lives close by I should probably see once a month, but I don’t see the point in calling or emailing him. My list would look like this:
- Dad – call – every 2 weeks
- Dad – face to face – every 3 months
- John – fact to face – every month
- etc
Don’t worry too much about the regularity, if you can’t keep up, you can always reduce it later and vice versa.
Step 3 – automate the list
You could stop here, but you would have a hard time remembering when you had contacted these people. What you need to do now is set up a reminder to contact each person, preferably one which recurs when and only when you actually have made contact.
Remember the Milk makes setting this up very easy. Assuming you have already familiarised yourself with the application (if you haven’t – take the time to do so), run through the following:
- Set up a new list called people.
- Add each person and context as a separate task (context being face to face, call etc), and set the repeat option to the regularity you chose earlier (after every month, after every week) etc. Its important you set the “after” keyword, so that when you mark the task as done, its a full month or week before you get another reminder.
- Ensure you check the application on a regular basis (its also possible to get emails sent to you) so you can get reminders to contact people
- When you are reminded to contact, do so when you have some time. If you can’t immediately, don’t worry, it will sit in your inbox until you have done so. I devote a set period each week to working through the contacts.
- Once you have contacted a person, mark the task as done and the person will slip down the list. At the same time review the regularity – perhaps you should be meeting the person more regularly, or if the meeting didn’t go so well, less!
That’s my advice for keeping in touch with people, hopefully you will find it useful and be able to redress the balance, get in touch with some old faces, and perhaps even win some new contracts.
photo credit: exfordy
