Two of the top five regrets of the dying are "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" and "I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” Because time is a limited resource, these regrets are two sides of the same coin. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would tell you family and relationships are not the most important thing in their lives.
Two of the top five regrets of the dying are "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" and "I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” Because time is a limited resource, these regrets are two sides of the same coin.
You'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would tell you family and relationships are not the most important thing in their lives.
Even the good folks chasing the big bag will probably tell you they are working for bread as a means of directly or indirectly improving the security, comfort, and well-being of their family or community.
Here’s a hard truth though: our daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly routines typically don't reflect nor respect the importance we place on relationships.
To be fair, some people are naturally better at making and maintaining relationships. Connectors and those with extroverted tendencies are what I would call born-different -- scouts call it being a ‘raw talent’.
For me, this is my Grandma and freshman year roommate and bestfriend, Dave.
Grandma averages 2.5 phone calls per day to old friends— from the house phone. Dave is a prolific facetimer and has won the loyalty title for the last few years — just ask his people.
As a consumer of a lot of productivity and lifestyle-design content, I can tell you there's plenty of productivity content out there. Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, and Matt D'Avella, some folks I watch on Youtube, have millions of followers that look to them primarily for strategies and tactics on how to be more productive in their work.
While each of them has quality content outside of productivity, none of it explains how to be more productive in our relationships.
I've found that most productivity bloggers and YouTubers talk about productivity and efficiency in our work lives as a means to free up time in our personal lives. Not only that, most say they aim to spend that free time with the people that matter most to them. But where is the content explaining how to actually spend that time? How to spread that time around the people in our lives? And yeah, my immediate family is important but where does everyone else fall on the hierarchy?
Where are the strategies and tactics for building and maintaining relationships?
That's what I was thinking. So I went back to Youtube as any Gen Z'er would. I typed in 'family productivity' thinking it would bring me Ali Abdaal's relationship guru counterpart. Instead, I was met with this:
As a black, childless, twenty-something-year-old who is trying to maintain relationships across the board, I’m not the target audience. On top of that, the digital content I could find seems to go two different speeds:
While there are transferable learnings from both of these, I needed something that was somewhere in the middle.
I shouldn’t have to wait until I have kids to get tactical about becoming a family person; I have parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts & uncles, cousins, friends, and colleagues that I care about right now!
I'm going to be sharing my journey building a system to build and maintain relationships, particularly with family and friends.
I'll walk you through where I'm coming from (I used to call my parents maybe once a month, now I catch up with someone new every week), what I've built so far, and what being 'Well-Connected' looks like for me.
Altogether, this system can tell you how to spend your time, who to spend which amount of time with, and even what to gift anyone you’re connected to at any time of the year.
My system currently includes the following:
Core Habits
Tools can only take us so far. For this system to work well, it’s important to build gratitude, reflection, and introspection into our lives. These all help us relate to people better.
People Database
Think of the People Database like an advanced address book. The people database holds everyone in your life and the things that are important to know about them. Beyond their address, which is certainly helpful to know where to send them gifts, it will hold and organize their interests, life updates, and the interactions between you all.
Interactions Log
The Interactions log allows to you record and plan important interactions between you and the people in your people database. Need to remember to check-in via text with Cousin JoJo? Just drop it in the Interactions Log and write out what you want to say. I've used this to re-connect with mentors, Morehouse brothers, and of course my cousin JoJo.
Gifts Database
The newest database in my system, the Gifts Database, might have the most immediate value add. It connects with the People database, which tells you what your people are interested in, to help you gift people things that will bring them joy.
There are a lot of moving parts here but this system is designed for minimal additional effort beyond regularly practicing gratitude, reflection, and introspection. Stay tuned for deeper looks into each of these components, how I built them, and how you can incorporate them into your life!
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