Simitless helps families and friends stay in touch.
App 54/60: Personal CRM
Simitless helps families and friends stay in touch.
As hard as you try, you simply cannot remember everything. Alas, you are just human. And yet there are so many things (or, rather, dates, occasions, events, anniversaries) that you need (and want) to keep in mind! Your family being so far does not make it any easier (in other words, it is not that easy to find someone who would let slip a word or a quick reminder about the upcoming surprise party for aunt Jane’s 56th birthday). And then there are your friends scattered to all four corners of the earth… And your humongous network of both personal and professional contacts! So many connections, so many names, so many details that you want to keep up with. And although from a purely theoretical perspective, the sheer number of people you know and want to continue to know might seem a bit daunting, you would not want to change your personal contact with everyone for anything else.
Just like my grandmother did. Up until a very old and proud age of 90, my grandmother remembered everything. She knew everyone in her neighborhood, she kept up-to-date with all her cousins, both close and distant ones. She never failed to send a card or give us a call for our birthday. In her later years, she even took to e-mailing! When she passed, we had to face the emotionally taxing task of emptying the family home. Yet, despite the pain, it was also an opportunity to rediscover keepsakes and memories, witnesses of several lives. Among a small pile of papers – her tools to keep up with the management of daily tasks and routines –, and a collection of documents, left in plain sight in her kitchen, a small notebook, lying on the shelf next to the bread bin, inadvertently caught my eye. It was an old agenda, dated 1976, that she seems to have repurposed. Don’t let anything go to waste, echoed in my head. This little book turned to be our treasure trove – her neat and orderly handwriting covering the pages with the names and contact details of all her close friends, of all the members of the family. Each name accompanied by the individual’s birthday, their contact details in accordance with their current residence, be it temporary or permanent, the names of their children, and their occupations. My grandmother, the pioneer, the precursor of modern software, had created her own information system, however simple, yet effective and indispensable it was.
And it was this brief moment of seeing this little notebook and realizing what it was and what it meant that inspired me to create an application model reproducing this practice. A practice that appeared so simple yet felt so powerful and meaningful. A practice that I perceived as something that brings to our loved ones the feeling of being important, of being supported and loved. It is a feeling that I often longed for, getting too busy with the everyday hustle and bustle of our rushed everyday lives. A feeling that I wanted to preserve and nurture, paying tribute to my grandmother in my own way.
This is how I came up with a Simitless application model for organizing information about the people in your life. This application is geared towards aiding your fallible memory on the one hand and enabling you to communicate more effectively with those around you on the other. Consult the application model, then click the " Use this model" button to create your own copy of the app. To save your progress, think of creating an account by following the instructions on the green buttons! Once your application has been created from the model provided, invite whoever you want to join the application by creating a Simitless account. ( Edit app Access rights). Entering and managing large volumes of data can be time-consuming. Why not share the task with a partner?
Once the bare-bones structure of your app is in place, you can start populating your app with data by creating a record for each important person in your life. For each such person, input their name and date of birth, followed by an address and contact information. You can go ahead and add the company they're working for, input the name of their employer, and their position in the company. If you don't want to use these info fields for any of your contacts at all, simply remove them from your data structure to simplify your app.
Next, for each contact, you can map out a list of their children, including their dates of birth, names of their schools, their hobbies, current interests, and passions, etc. Additionally, you can input their marital status and the name of their partner. To sum it up, you can go into as much detail as you deem necessary, and you can modify, enhance, or, on the contrary, cut down your app as much as you like.
What finding this notebook in my grandmother’s kitchen has taught me is that the best way to be close to people is to listen to them and remember what is dear to them. And the best way to remember things is to write them down. That’s all that matters, really.