I Hate Personal CRMs. I Might Need One.
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I Hate Personal CRMs. I Might Need One.<br>Why does friendship admin feel so embarrassing?
Shikhar Sachdev<br>Jun 19, 2026
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It’s Thursday evening, 11:30pm, and I am exhausted.<br>Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done nothing extraordinary. I’ve commuted to work, done the work, gone to the gym, done the things that one does at the gym, showered, picked up groceries, cooked pasta, watched World Cup highlights, cleaned the dishes, put in my laundry, and finally just sat down with my laptop. I’m very grateful for this day and my mother would indeed refer to me as extraordinary, but there is nothing remarkable about the set of activities I’ve performed.<br>Speaking of activities: one that I will not be doing is responding to you.<br>A hangout sometime this month sounds awesome and I would honestly love to catch up. Like, genuinely. I know that once I’d be in a conversation with you, walking around Dolores Park and then grabbing a coffee, I’d be smiling and nodding and making fantastic eye contact and having a grand time.<br>And yet. I simply can’t text you right now. I know I should, but I just cannot muster the energy or willpower that it takes to craft a three sentence text message.<br>They say relying on willpower is lazy. Smart people rely on systems.<br>A few years ago, a particular type of app kept making the rounds on the internet, especially in the “sophisticated” corners of the internet like X and Hacker News, that promised to apply systems-level thinking to something more human: your friendships.<br>Just like Salesforce is a CRM for commercial prospects, these “personal CRMs” promise to help you track the important people in your life — not random LinkedIn connections you accepted last year, but the roommate from college who no longer lives in the same city.
These personal CRMs give me the ick. This is because they attempt to help me optimize something in my life that…shouldn’t need to be optimized. They make friendship feel like account management.<br>The people who give me immense joy shouldn’t require a push notification to remember. Scheduling a hangout shouldn’t feel like a game of table tennis. We are social creatures. I shouldn’t need help to keep in touch. Something about needing help, and then god forbid, actually pressing a button to get that help, seems morally wrong. So wrong that if I were to actually reach out to someone in my life because of such an app, I’d confess. To what? Not sure. But something, that’s for sure.<br>I wondered if this was just a me thing. I have some friends that are really good at keeping in touch with the people in their lives. I get texts from them every week that I have trouble responding to. Is this a skill that I just haven’t developed? The skill of maintaining and cultivating (weak) social ties in my life?<br>I did also wonder if this was a feature and not a bug. After all, if I don’t have the energy to keep in touch with someone, do I actually need that person in my life? Shouldn’t that tell me something?<br>I’m not sure. I think that’s bullshit. If I make a list of the people that I haven’t reached out to in a while and see which ones I’ve had a genuinely amazing time hanging out with, that intersection of names would be not small.<br>The prevalence of these personal CRMs suggests that others struggle with this too – Monica HQ, for example, has 44,000 users. Let’s look at their messaging:
I want to be a better friend. I want to show up for the people in life that matter.
Holy shit. Life did get in the way today. I had to feed myself. These weights weren’t going to lift themselves. And once I did that, my CNS was fried and my priority became self-care. Life got in the way. Let me buy your app.<br>No, but like, I’m serious. If using a personal CRM results in me keeping in touch with more awesome people in my life, is the fact that I needed “help” to do that really such a bad thing?<br>I ask and take help in many other areas of my life. I ask chat for advice on what to cook and how to cook. At the gym, my coach helps me understand what good form looks like. At work, I ask questions in Slack every day, despite having been at my company for more than four years.<br>Asking for help is not the problem. Asking for help for something that is considered deeply human is the problem.<br>There are so many people in my life that I want to keep in touch with that I don’t. I started writing these names down to the list below, but the list got so big that I actually got a bit embarrassed. I was at fifteen people when I stopped counting.<br>These are fifteen people who have made my life much better. I have laughed and smiled with these people. I owe it to myself to keep in touch with them.<br>If I had to summarize in plain English why I don’t reach out to these fifteen people regularly, I’d probably say something like: my brain can’t quite capture the immediate rewards that it’d receive from spending time with this person, and because my life won’t get...