Your contacts app has names and numbers. Your messaging app has conversations. But when you saw someone and what you did lives nowhere. The best you can do is scroll back through a chat and guess at the date.
That’s why you always notice too late that you’ve drifted from someone. It’s rarely that you stopped caring — it’s that nothing ever told you it had been a while.
Sales teams solve this with a CRM. You don’t need one for your friends and family, but the idea behind it — writing down each contact, and being reminded when it’s been too long — works just as well for a personal life.
Three things are enough
Most people who try to keep track of people give up because they aim too high. Fill in personality, preferences and a relationship chart, and you’ll stop at the first person. You only need three things.
When
The date you met. Collect just this, and 'how long since we last saw each other' answers itself.
With whom
Who was there. If it was more than one person, note them all — later you'll see who you tend to see together.
What
One line is plenty. A note like 'thinking about changing jobs' picks the conversation back up six months later.
Fill in the rest when it comes up. Birthdays and how you know someone are easiest to add on the day you learn them, not as a form to complete up front.
Don’t keep a separate log — tag people where you already write
The biggest reason people logs fail is that they’re one more thing to maintain. Almost nobody writes a journal entry and then opens a separate contacts notebook.
So flip it around: tag people in the journal or calendar you already use. You never record anything twice, and who you met and when builds up on its own. A single tag connects the whole context of that day to that person.
Use an interval instead of your memory
The people you most want to stay close to are often the ones you put off, because it’s never urgent. Willpower won’t fix that, so turn it into a rule.
Giving each person a contact interval works well — your parents every two weeks, an old friend every three months. A vague “I should really call” becomes a concrete one or two people to reach out to today.
You don’t need intervals for everyone. Start with about five people. If the reminders start to feel like a burden, that’s a sign the interval is too short.
Birthdays: remind yourself twice
A reminder on the day is enough for a message, but not for anything more. If you want to send a gift or make plans, you need time to prepare. Set one reminder a few days before and one on the day itself.
Only include birthdays you’ll actually act on. Import every contact’s birthday and the reminders go off every week until you stop reading them.
What you see once it adds up
After a year or so, the record stops being a list and becomes a picture: who you saw most, who you haven’t seen in a while, which people always show up together.
What matters there isn’t the ranking but the missing names. Realizing you saw someone you call close only twice in a year is something you rarely notice until you count.
How mylog does this
mylog is this approach built into an app. Tag people in your diary entries and events, and everything you shared collects on their profile. Give someone a contact interval and they show up in “Time to reach out” on the home screen when it’s been too long. Birthdays and anniversaries show as D-days, and each reminder can fire days in advance as well as on the day.
Over time your records turn into a ranking of who you see most and a sense of relationship warmth. You can import names from your device contacts, and snap a business card to turn it into a profile — the date you received it becomes the date you first met. Imported details and card photos stay on your device; contacts are never uploaded to a server.
It’s quicker to see it. The People feature has screenshots, and the live preview lets you tap around without installing anything.