Does anyone use a personal CRM for mapping and managing their own relationships?

Does anyone know of a good and cheap or free way of digitally mapping and managing their personal relationships? I use a CRM at work that does the job for professional contacts, but it’s expensive for single users. I could use a mind map, but wondering if anyone has a better solution?

Notion had relational databases you probably can use for it

What sort of managing do you want to do?

I have a text file with two lists in it: “People I want to keep up with more often” and “People I want to keep up with less often”. People are listed on the list together with the way I most commonly contact them just to remind me, so it says for example “Tom Lawrence, QS forum”, or “Mum, phone”

I have a few recurring reminders in my standard reminder program of the general form “Message someone in the [frequent|infrequent] contact list”, which are set to go off more or less frequently (the frequency gets adjusted sometimes according to my energy level).

When I see a reminder, I open the text file and I move anyone on the list that I recall interacting with recently to the bottom of the list, so anybody who I haven’t interacted with frequently will eventually end up at the top.

Whoever’s at the top of the list, I send them a message to say “hi” in some form. Sometimes it’s “Hey, I was thinking of you today, how’s things?” sometimes it’s “hey here’s a stupid picture of my cat that I took today”, sometimes it’s a link to an article I read recently, sometimes I phone them, whatever seems appropriate to the person. Sometimes if I have energy I’ll contact a whole bunch of folk, other times I just can’t face it and I dismiss the reminder and curl up in a hole instead :slight_smile: I don’t push myself too much because I don’t want to end up making it this aversive task I hate

It’s actually worked really well though. There’s a fair chunk of people, especially on the “keep up more often” list, who I just find I am naturally keeping up with and never need reminding-via-list which is fine. The degree of manual vs automaticness in the system suits me really well - I know I could make it a lot more streamlined if I wanted to but I don’t want to, it’s people, I want it to be conscious and something I think about

Yes I do :slight_smile:

I’ve tried many, here are a few ideas:
https://nat.app/blog/personalcrm2021

I’m mainly using it to find people I’d otherwise forget about but there are many use cases of course.

You can also try to build your own - Airtable has a template for it.