Staying in touch with people is one of these asymmetric habits that require little effort, time and resources but has an unlimited upside. It’s the easiest and most effective way to make your life more serendipitous.

Okay enough of that. Since you clicked on the headline I will assume you understand why it makes sense to keep in touch with people.

Unfortunately, for most people (me included) this isn’t something that happens naturally.

So unless you have a solid system, chances are high that you won’t reach out to people regularly and miss out on a ton of fun and opportunities.

Derek Sivers has a cool system. He divides all people he wants to stay in touch with into four categories: A, B, C, D:

• people on the A list are contacted every three weeks,
• people on the B list every two months,
• people on the C list every six,
• and people on the D list once a year.

While this system sounds deceptively simple, like most people, I wasn’t really able to make it work.

You obviously need some technology but all CRMs (and PRMs) I tried felt overkill. Derek ended up programming his own database software which he however never shared publicly.

Also:

• What exactly do you write? Derek’s advice is rather vague: “Just find out how they’re doing. See if you can help them in any way.”
• What about people you never interacted with? How do they enter the system?

Now I recently finally figured out a way to make Derek’s system work. Obviously, this is why I’m writing this post.

Let’s get into it. It’s free, fun, and simple.

The Setup

I’m using one Airtable base with two tables.

The first one is titled Established Contacts. As the name suggests it’s for everyone I already interacted with at some point and want to keep in touch with.

I like to keep things as simple as possible, so there are only 7 columns: Name, Contact Info, Notes, Category, Last Contact, Next Contact, Trigger Reminder.

The first three columns are simple text columns while the third one, Category, is a single select column (”A”, “B”, “C”, “D”).

The Next Contact column is calculated as a function of the values in the Category and Last Contact columns.

Here’s the formula in case you want to copy it:

IF(
    Category="D",
        DATEADD({Last Contact},12,'month'),
        IF(Category="C",
            DATEADD({Last Contact},6,'month'),
            IF(Category="B",
                DATEADD({Last Contact},2,'month'),
                IF(Category="A",
                DATEADD({Last Contact},3,'weeks'))
              )
           )
    )

The values (e.g. contacts in the C category are contacted every 6 months) are exactly the same that Derek Sivers uses.

The Trigger Reminder column is then populated by comparing the Next Contact column with today’s date.

Here’s the formula:

IF(  
    AND(    
        {Next Contact},
        NOW() >= {Next Contact}  
        ), 
    "Trigger Reminder"
   )

The second table, titled Potential New Contacts is even simpler. In