Happy Sunday,

I saw a recent post online documenting how the amount of time we spend with certain people in our lives changes as we get older. There were two charts that caught my eye.

The first chart shows the time we spend with our romantic partner increases over the time:

You spend the bulk of your free time with your partner, making it one of the most important decisions of your life, and adding context to my previous dispatch about Happy Single Women and Lonely Single Men. No wonder changing expectations in relationships are going to disrupt the status quo: it's going to impact how millions of people spend the majority of their time on a daily basis.

The second chart looks at the declining amount of time we spend with friends as we age.

We lean on our partner and lose touch with friends. While maintaining friendships has always been challenging, the online nature of relationships, the global landscape of contacts, and the fact that our networks are bigger than ever before have created new hurdles.

Ironically, it's easier than ever to feel disconnected in the age of constant connection.

For many of us, the Pandemic had a big impact on our networks. We were isolated from context-friends like gym-buddies and hobby friends, we couldn't go to places to meet new people (conferences, events, social gatherings), we couldn't travel to keep in touch with out-of-city friends, and, as if that wasn't enough, we were suffering through a period of deep unrest and fear that sapped our social batteries.

The effects of this period of time on our social relationships will continue to be felt in the years to come. While many of us strengthened a small handful of core relationships, we let secondary and tertiary connections fall to the wayside.

NEW! The School of Digital Wellbeing: Building Networks that Last

As promised, you get my best stuff first. I'm excited to share a very early sneak peek into a project I've been working on for a while: a set of Skillshare Courses that will tackle the practical skills we need to maintain a state of digital well-being.

One of the first courses will be Building Networks that Last: a guide to abundant relationships. (Final title TBD).

I think many of us need to repair and restore our networks intentionally. As I wrote in a previous dispatch, Network Design is more important than ever, and is a skill many people don't think about.

The benefits of managing your social network can be profound:

• Keep in regular touch with people, ensuring friendships don't accidentally fall to the wayside.
• If you travel a lot, having an easy database of where people are located can be a great catalyst to reaching out if you're passing through their city.
• Keep track of people's professional and personal milestones.
• Keep track of things like birthdays or special occasions, ensuring you show up for the people in your life.
• Build and develop new relationships
• Maintain existing relationships that are important to you.
• Outsource these maintenance tasks to a system so you don't have to keep remembering everything.

The Rise of Personal CRMs :

Considering my own struggles in managing my network, I'm not surprised there has been an explosion of personal CRMs. A CRM (Custom Relationship Manager) is a software used for businesses to keep track of their clients: incoming leads, current clients, lost leads, and a summary of the relationship (the last point of contact, who they spoke to, etc.).

Personal CRMs, apply the same principle for our personal connections. They can be a powerful tool for organizing a large and diverse networks, especially if you have several different verticals of people in your life.

I've been experimenting with two so far: Clay and Fabriq (Seriously, can we just spell things normally?)

However, I've run into the same issue with both: a messy network makes many of these features useless. So, I'm putting them on hold for now and am focusing on cleaning up my network first. Let's talk about how to do that.

Digital Wellbeing: How to Audit Your Network

1. Make a list of your current social connections. There are some CRM apps that do this for you, enabling you to organize your contacts into different groups. I did this the manual way: I exported my LinkedIn/Instagram data and went through it noting the people I want to stay in touch with. I'm putting the names into a spreadsheet for now, so I don't waste time if I decide to stop using app and have to start over with another.

2. Evaluate the quality of your connections. Which connections are meaningful and supportive? For me, I use what I call the friendship buzz. Do you have those people that fire you up, expand your perspective, and generally leave you with a feeling of delight? Those are the people I want to spend more time with. Everyone has a limited number of time, so we must prioritize what relationships deserve our time and attention.

3. Determine Contact Frequency & Context. Next, I went through my list and figured out how often I wanted to contact them and if there is a specific context attached. For example, I know that I'll see a bunch of people at certain events throughout the year, so I made a note to ping them a few weeks prior in order to be able to arrange an in-person meetup.

I noted who lives in the cities I often visit to remember to reach out when I'm there. Finally, there are some people I wanted to contact once a quarter or even once a month. I listed all of this in the spread sheet.

4. Identify gaps in your network. Are you missing people in certain age groups, geographic locations, titles, or areas of interest? Are there any people who you’d like to reconnect with? What do you want this network to do? This could be building deeper connections with certain people, or expanding your network to include new types of connections.

5. Set goals for your social network: based on your evaluation and gaps, set some clear goals. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to have more fiction writing friends, and spent a good part of 2019 building out those relationships specifically, and now that part of my network is solid. This year, I'd like to focus on expanding my Paris network.

6. Set a time in your calendar each week (or a time interval that works for you). Reaching out to people takes time. Even if it is just a quick email or text message, it still needs to get done. By carving out a specific time to reach out to people, it becomes easier to blend this into your routine. You might have to experiment to see how much time you actually need and adjust your expectations and outreach accordingly. Note: auditing will take more time than actually managing the network.

By taking a step back and seriously evaluating your network, you’re better equipped to build and maintain relationships that can last. We all want meaningful, deep relationships in our lives, and with a little effort we can make this an easy and painless aspect of our lives.

Bits & Bytes:

FACE/OFF:

There's a viral new filter going around Tiktok called Bold Glamor. You can see it on my face here. One of the reasons filters are looking so realistic is a shift in technology: this particular filter is made with machine learning. Old filters were made using augmented 3D face mesh that gets laid on top of your face, which is why the filter moves if you put your hand in front of it. But this new generation of filters use Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) which means that every pixel on your face is regenerated and then outputted after referencing a dataset of images. That's why it looks so creepily realistic. These types of filters are going to have a big impact on beauty standards, self-esteem, and digital norms. I spoke to the Toronto Star about it a few days ago. (Lol, they posted my tiktok where I drop multiple F bombs...oops!)

Foushy Updates:

Currently: Spring is slowly arriving at Happy Fox Farms, and I'm starting to think about my plan for this year's garden. After reading "How Not to Die" (more on this book next week) I'm definitely adding broccoli, kale, greens, berries, and more herbs to my planning list. I'm in the middle of reading: The Art and Business of Online Writing, Gentle Nutrition, and Buy Back Your Time. Have you watched the Murdaugh doc on Netflix? Bonkers.

Up Next: I'm headed to Puebla, Mexico next week for Festival de Las Ideas. Jesse is coming with me and we're spending a few days in Mexico City. I can't wait to dive into all the culture and all the food. We've already booked a street food & textile market tour, a Mezcal Mixology session, and dinner at some of the most fun and interesting restaurants. Can you sense my excitement?!?!