Beeminding friendship

[dreev]

I don’t think it’s forced! I beemind calling my parents, for example, and it’s great.

Conversations with my mother: Thank you, Beeminder!

I am an absolute puddle and am making a Beeminder goal to call my parents right now. Thank you so much, Alex, and I’m so sorry about your mom.

See also this old thread with ideas:

Beeminding social stuff?

Hi folks! It seems like every year we have one of these posts, but how are folks beeminding social stuff these days? What are the caveats? What works super well for you? I never even clicked through on any of these before, but now I work from home 100%, I’m considering it! Previously (Beeminding social life, and Beeminding social skills - how to do it best?)

And here’s another thing I came across: https://clay.earth/

Not that I think another 3rd-party tool is necessarily the answer. If you put all your contacts in a spreadsheet or database you could use something like our gissue-freshening protocol. Adapting that to staying in touch with friends might look like this:

Create a goal called, say, “touch” or “rolodex” as a manual do-more goal that needs a +1 a couple times a week or whatever makes sense for you. You get a +1 for any of the following:

1. Add a new person to your contact list.
2. Call or send a message to the least recently updated and non-snoozed person in the list and update the description field to mention that you did so.
3. Snooze the least recently updated person, ie, mark them as someone you’re ok with falling out of touch with.

Oh geez, this is making me realize I need this so badly I’m going to set it up right now. Since I already have good protocols for this in GitHub I’m going to do it there. Et voila:

Beeminder