People let me tell you ‘bout my best friend

Rebooting is a biweekly newsletter about how we can use technology to take better care of ourselves.

There are a lot of things I’m reliably awful at. Making my monthly credit card payment on time, turning off the oven when I’m done cooking, and checking the mail are just a few of the ways I routinely inconvenience myself. Sure, late fees aren’t fun, but usually these little hurdles never weigh down my day too much. My inability to keep up with all my friends, though, is the absolute pits.

Every time I go into a chat and realize I didn’t hit send on a message I typed out a week ago, or see that I missed someone’s birthday by a couple days, it gets harder to tell myself I’m a good, dependable friend. It’s not that I don’t try, but getting wrapped up in daily responsibilities and blown-out-of-proportion woes can make it hard to stay on top of when you last grabbed coffee with your college bestie. And social media can give you a false sense of keeping up, since you can technically stay in the know as you breeze through your newsfeed.

I’ve generally set reminders in my to-do list for these types of things, like texting a friend good luck before their quarterly review or asking how someone’s ill family member has been doing, but jumbling together relationship maintenance with tasks like taking my dogs to the vet or reorganizing my book tracker in Airtable felt weird and out of place; these are meaningful, emotional connections, not boxes to tick off for a sense of accomplishment.

After reading Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Atlantic piece about personal CRMs—apps that help you manage your relationships and stay in touch with people— my hopes of becoming the Ted to all the Bills in my life finally seemed within reach.

I tried out a few of the apps mentioned in the piece and stumbled upon another, Yujo, which lets you create profiles for all the people—called “companions”—you’d like to stay in touch with, like your neighbor, old workout buddy from back home, or your third cousin twice removed.

In Yujo, there’s an option to pull directly from your contacts to create companion profiles, which will get their photo, name, phone number, birthday, and anything else you’ve tossed in; you can also just do it manually, if you’d prefer. From there, you pick a label for each companion: professional, friend, or family. Finally, you can plug in the date you first met them, and any additional notes, which I use for things like “work has been frustrating them lately” or “just got a new puppy” so I have some things to check in on aside from their general wellbeing.

As great as that database of pals and their relevant dates is, it wouldn’t mean much if it didn’t actually encourage me to stay in touch with these people in a way that goes beyond “wow I can’t believe I forgot to respond to this I’m so sorry!” Thankfully, Yujo also has reminders that range from daily, every three days, to weekly or even every two months, and they should vary depending on your connection with each person.

The nice thing is that it doesn’t treat these relationships as tasks to tick off as if you’re trying to meet a quota; Yujo’s notifications refer to these interactions as memories, which sounds like a subtle change, but it’s a reminder that this is more than just doing something actionable to feel a sense of accomplishment.

I’m pretty good about staying in touch with those in my inner circle, but I’m the needy friend and always have to feel seen, so maintaining those extra relationships requires a little more work on my end. Moving back and forth across the country has sort of defined my life for the past three years, and Yujo has helped me stay in touch with the friends I made at my first writing job in San Francisco, and the roommates I briefly crashed with in New York before leaving at a moment’s notice.

Maybe you shouldn’t need an app just to remember to say hello. It’d be nice to say I’m always thinking about my friends and know exactly what to say, but existential dread, two needy pups, and a lifetime diagnosis of an ever-forgetful brain make that difficult. But the guilt of needing a bit of code to be a good friend gets whisked away pretty quickly when you have your monthly FaceTime session and get to see how well your friend’s doing.

In the News:

Inside my nightmarish quest for screen time zero (OneZero): Cutting screen time is a tricky thing. I wrote a bit about this a couple weeks ago, and I sort of came to the same conclusion that we can’t easily get rid of our phones and computers, but we can wiggle our way into a healthier relationship with them. That’s probably not as easy for a server who needs to be on their phone to get shifts covered or check their schedule online every couple days as it is for a freelance writer or someone who spends most of their days in meetings, though, which makes the way we frame the conversation of digital well-being that much more important. We can’t expect people who rely on their phones for work communications, or even things like long distance relationships, to be able to adopt the same wellness practices as someone who uses their devices for things like hour-long gaming sessions or exhaustingly thorough Wikipedia dives. 

Tinder asks ‘does this bother you’? (Wired): If there’s one thing that would make online dating better, it would be a big red badge that would signal any major red flags before you take the plunge. This isn’t exactly that, but it’s an interesting way to tackle offensive or harmful messages on a platform where they’re so rampant. The problem, as Arielle Pardes points out, is that it might not actually change the behavior of the perpetrators, and just puts another bit of emotional labor on the recipients of nasty comments. 

Something Nice:

Jeopardy!: It’s been on Netflix for a while, but I’m only diving in now that I’m nearly out of cooking shows. There’s plenty of great stuff to watch on TV right now, but sometimes it’s nice to take a break from the harsh realities of the news and the sinking feeling gritty prestige dramas gives us in favor of a few minutes with people who just like to flex their knowledge and maybe win some cash. 

As always, if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to say hello, feel free to drop me a line on Twitter.

My thanks to Medea Giordano for editing this issue.