When I tell people that I have a CRM system to make sure I keep in touch with my friends and family on a regular basis, people either look at me weird or they give me a smirk thinking that it makes the relationships cold and transactional.

But I never understood this sentiment. To me, all of us implement and work through systems at work so as to ‘guarantee’ outcomes – outcomes that have been determined to be important for the business we work in.

And so if we’re constantly told that work isn’t the most important thing, why is it that we ‘work hard’ at maximising outcomes for our workplace but choose to be ok with taking a laissez-faire approach towards the outcomes of the more important relationships in our lives?

Are we getting our priorities wrong?
Should we not at least shoot for parity?

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For anyone who’s curious, I have a system that I’ve set up for myself using a combination of ClickUp and Obsidian. I used to use a self-hosted instance of Monica CRM but I’ve been trying to move more of my data into Obsidian since it makes it easier for me to then use the vault files as a knowledgebase with Claude CLI.