How often should you keep in touch? Setting a cadence that survives a busy month

Most people who try to be deliberate about staying in touch fail in the same way: they set every contact to the same interval, usually monthly, feel good for two weeks, and then drown. A cadence only works if it is unequal, because your relationships are unequal, and pretending otherwise produces a reminder list you learn to ignore.

Sort people by consequence, not affection

The question is not how much you like someone. It is what happens if a year passes in silence. For a close friend, nothing — you pick up where you left off, because the relationship has a floor. For a former colleague who would have thought of you for a role, quite a lot: that relationship has no floor, and silence dissolves it.

This inverts the intuitive ordering. The people who need a scheduled nudge are often not your closest; they are the ones held together by nothing but occasional contact.

A starting set of intervals

• Every 2 to 4 weeks: the handful of people you are actively building something with — a co-founder, a current client, someone in the middle of a hard year.
• Every 2 to 3 months: close friends you do not see by default, and the ten or so professional contacts who genuinely matter to your work.
• Every 6 months: the wider professional network. Former colleagues, people you met and liked, the ones you would want to hear from if they were hiring.
• Once a year: everyone else worth keeping at all. A single message in December is not nothing — it is the difference between a contact and a stranger.

If more than about fifteen people are on an interval shorter than three months, the list is aspirational rather than real, and it will collapse. Demote some.

Why the interval should reset on contact, not on the calendar

A cadence tied to dates produces guilt and noise: you spoke yesterday, and the first of the month still tells you to reach out. A cadence measured from last contact asks the only sensible question — has it been too long since we actually spoke? — and goes quiet when the answer is no. This also means that logging a conversation is the single most valuable habit in the system, because every prompt downstream depends on it.

What counts as contact

Be strict but not silly. A real exchange counts: a call, a coffee, a proper back-and-forth over message, a substantive email. A like on a post does not. Seeing them across a room does not. The whole system runs on this honesty, and the only person you can cheat is yourself — which is also why there is no value in marking someone contacted to clear a badge.

The counterpart to strictness is logging the small stuff that is genuine. A two-line message that got a two-line reply is contact. It resets the clock, and it should.

Recovering when you fall behind

You will. The recovery move is not to work through the backlog in order of how overdue people are, because that is sorted by shame. Pick the five with the most at stake, clear those, and then forgive the rest by pushing their intervals out to something honest. A list that says twice a year and is true beats a list that says monthly and is fiction.

If a name keeps resurfacing and you keep skipping it, that is information. Either the interval is wrong or the relationship has ended, and both are fine. Writing that down is not cold; it is the thing that gives the remaining names their weight.

Making it automatic

The mechanics are simple enough to run in a notebook, and people do. What software adds is that the clock runs without you: last contact updates when you log something, the overdue list sorts itself, and a weekly summary tells you who slipped. A.R.O does this per contact and sends a weekly brief — see features — but the method above is the part that matters, whatever you use. For getting your people in to begin with, see importing your contacts.