Unhinged - my perfect friendship tracker & reminder app ๐ฑ
Maintaining friendships become harder as you grow up. I've written about it before, and I've seen others state the same. Life gets in the way, especially with children. Last week, I had dinner with friends and one mentioned when driving home, that these meetups allow him to talk to his brother, as they otherwise have so little opportunities together.
I always found the concept of a people CRM interesting, a way to keep track of everyone, but didn't want to go overboard on fancy or complicated systems.
In my Obsidian Vault, I already tagged notes with people, allowing me to query the days I interacted with others, however, it's not a system to remain aware of everything. I think it was more of a gimmick of testing the "contribution graph" plugin, to see entries on a given day.
The post of Stephen on building a friendship tracker, which he saw on Reddit, was a reminder to restart looking into a system and focus on my relationships.
The reddit post outlined a system with Obsidian bases, querying notes with people and highlighting which connections needed attention. I don't think this is a bad system, but it needs work. First you need to put the config in place, next you need to ensure the actions are done properly, by creating a note and tagging a person.
There is already a lot of other data in my Obsidian vault, so reshuffling everything to make the tracker work, seemed a bit much. Hence I started looking at other solutions. Also, as to make any system work, it needs to be easy to add, update and check people and entries.
I've tested with Bear and Zeitgeist first, as quick and easy tools to input and retrieve information, and both worked ok. However, I settled on Unhinged as it provided a few more useful features. With Bear and Zeitgeist, I used tags to monitor & query everything, where Unhinged offers a complete system.
Unhinged
Unhinged by Marcel Wichmann describes itself as a mood tracker, where you add mood entries during the day, including the people you interacted with and good or bad tags.
The beauty of Unhinged is its focus on gaining insights, where every person or tag that you use in your entries is clickable can be analysed. For each, you are presented with a day heatmap to quickly view when you last interacted with someone, or used that particular tag. And you also get a list of all day entries, allowing you to check what you wrote interacting with that person or tag.
With every person I interact with, or find important, I add an entry to the day, including the things we might have done or talked about, tag the entry with that person and perhaps extra tags. An entry can have as little or as much information as needed. And one thing I noticed is that since starting this system, I'm more deliberate in my listening skills, trying to find things to remember.
And all these things add up and can become a nice conversation starter, but also create stronger connections, making people feel important by remembering details about them.
Chatting with my brother-in-law, he mentioned he would run an event. I made an entry of our conversation, so I could ask him afterwards how it went. People light up when you show you care.
It's very easy to forget the little things, but theses sometimes matter the most. Like my dad going for a vaccination and hearing test. I would have forgotten about this if I wouldn't have logged it somewhere.
The real magic
But the real kicker about Unhinged are its notes and reminders. Every person has an entry and notes section, in which you can add useful information, varying from birthday, likes, dislikes,... And for each of these notes, you can set a reminder.
So in the example of Dad, I created a note and reminder, which conveniently showed on my home screen when I was on my was to my parents to pick up the boys. Similarly, a friend will run the marathon of Athena in a few weeks, and with a note and reminder, it's part of his profile and I'll be reminded to ask him about it.
I've been using Unhinged for the last couple of weeks, and it helped me to stay on top of my relationships. Checking in on people where interactions were slipping, or asking follow-up questions after a previous conversation.
And while I use Unhinged purely as a relationship tracker and reminder app, you can do so much more with in terms of what you want to log and keep track of.
One caveat though, Unhinged is only available for iOS and requires a subscription, but $14.99/year is peanuts to me as it provides way more value.
Screenshots
Below you can see a few screenshots, from Unhinged in demo mode, redacting sensitive information. I know, perhaps too much is hidden, but in case you want more details, see the screenshots on the app page.
Journal entries for a day, showing the times of the interactions, people (circles) and tags (ex. In person / work).
Stats overview page, acting as a quick view when I had interactions worth remembering.
A person's profile page, showing the date heatmaps, all entries and notes section.
The people overview page, with reminders at the top and a list of everyone with a profile page.
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