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Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

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Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#161

Post by encom »

dqv wrote: post #159
encom wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is peak Silicon Valley. A Personal Relationship Manager feels like something that would be used against you in a jury trial. Not any specific information entered into it, just the fact alone that you were using it.

Why? What is the difference between this and a filofax except for the fact that one is digital and one is not?

I think it's the "taking it way too far"-aspect of it, compared to a regular calendar[0], that makes it so creepy. It's the fedora and trenchcoat of calendars.

[0]Which my casual duckduckgoing indicates a filofax is.[1]

[1]On re-reading the above, I fear it might have sounded a little condescending, which was not my intention. I've just never heard of filofax before. In Denmark we just call those calendars or occasionally "Mayland", after a popular brand that makes those.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#162

Post by TheOperator »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #37

Not sure if this was already argued elsewhere as I understand that monica gets posted here frequently, but on the readme: > This project is for people who have hard time remembering details about other people's lives - especially the ones they care about. My argument is, if you actually cared for someone, wouldn't you take the effort to remember everything about them, rather than saving it in a social relationship da…

>Saving your friend's child's birthday in a database just so you can say that you remembered vs actually remembering their birthday; I feel like there is a huge gap between the two. I would rather have 1 genuine relationship, rather than 100 superficial, inauthentic relationships.

I would say you're looking at it completely wrong and you don't have to forget somebodies birthday that many times before you write it down because all it does is hurt everybody. Some segment of the population forgets these things EVEN WITH the inner circle of people they know.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#163

Post by TheOperator »

vonseel wrote: post #64
hisnameisjimmy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally get this thinking, but I am oriented totally differently from you. I will forget my friend's birthdays, their kids names, their wife's names, things they've talked about recently, etc, etc. I have a terrible memory for this stuff. I'm not sure if it's just me being stubborn, but all of these things just feel very slippery to my mind. On the other end, I will remember in vibrant detail very trivial facts tha…

You won't forget the names when it matters. If you can't remember these basic details, it's a sign that person is not close enough to you for it to actually matter. Or, maybe you're like me and you just met the person five minutes ago. Either case is forgivable.

No some people have disabilities and stuff. People with Alzheimer's aren't simply suffering from not being close enough with their friends and family.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#164

Post by dqv »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #37

Not sure if this was already argued elsewhere as I understand that monica gets posted here frequently, but on the readme: > This project is for people who have hard time remembering details about other people's lives - especially the ones they care about. My argument is, if you actually cared for someone, wouldn't you take the effort to remember everything about them, rather than saving it in a social relationship da…

>My argument is, if you actually cared for someone, wouldn't you take the effort to remember everything about them, rather than saving it in a social relationship database?

I mean aren't you going to have to write it down somewhere anyway? Maybe you're not familiar with the world of journaling/notebooks, but people use them (and have been using them) for the same purpose. Before technology, people still wrote information down about the people they cared about.

> Saving your friend's child's birthday in a database just so you can say that you remembered vs actually remembering their birthday

I mean if you're taking the time to write it down I think that demonstrates a level of genuineness. It's not always possible to e.g. have the foresight 3 months in advance to say "ah I can't do that because my friend's child's birthday is then".

>I would rather have 1 genuine relationship, rather than 100 superficial, inauthentic relationships.

I think authenticity has a lot more to do with experiences you have with a person, which is augmented by making sure you're available to spend time with them on important dates, having awareness of their likes and dislikes, and just taking note of general information. I find that, personally, when I take the time to write these things down, I actually keep them in my memory.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#165

Post by TheOperator »

tenpies wrote: post #33
musicale wrote: post #32

I tend to think that CRM is the wrong model for friends and family. Brain + contact info on your computer/phone + calendar with reminders for birthdays etc. + pencil and paper for notes catches the most important things but allows us to forget the less important things.

What's the major difference between what you're suggesting and a CRM? I tend to think back of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and there's an entire chapter devoted to what is basically an analog CRM and devoting time to staying up to date with it (including scheduling calls). If anything I think a CRM applies even more because I care more about friends and family than I do about a sales pipeline. More effor…

Using a CRM tool like this means generating data that is only usefully formatted when using the tool which makes its long term utility highly dependant on the tools maintainer. Calendar+contacts+notes are already standards, already very portable, already very mature, we've had gcal running for a decade and a half now. Unless you're intending to completely replace your calendar/contacts/notes somehow it's a net gain in overhead and complexity.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#166

Post by dqv »

encom wrote: post #161
dqv wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What is the difference between this and a filofax except for the fact that one is digital and one is not?

I think it's the "taking it way too far"-aspect of it, compared to a regular calendar[0], that makes it so creepy. It's the fedora and trenchcoat of calendars. [0]Which my casual duckduckgoing indicates a filofax is.[1] [1]On re-reading the above, I fear it might have sounded a little condescending, which was not my intention. I've just never heard of filofax before. In Denmark we just call those calendars or occasio…

I guess I don't understand what about it is taking it too far. With a filofax, you're taking all kinds of information down about people. Calendaring is one aspect of it, but it's really an analog personal information manager. People keep yearly archives of the information. So is it that a digital PIM automates some of this process that you object to?

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#167

Post by pimlottc »

purplecats wrote: post #51
pests wrote: post #20

Just like David Rockerfeller's Rolodex! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867741 I've always wanted to create something like this myself. Glad to see someone do it.

I’m guessing more people do this, they just don’t post about it. I made my own solution to this 6 years ago and use it to this day. my solution leverages google people api so it’s automatically synced as part of the notes field of my contacts, and I have an app in my iphone and on my desktop and a cloud interface to quickly manage and query the data. 10/10 recommend and wish it was more normalized

Sounds cool, have you considered putting it on github?

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#168

Post by dqv »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #45
kstrauser wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I simply cannot remember all of the social niceties I’m expected to remember. For me personally, I show that I care for people by giving myself reminders that they have an important event. Let’s turn this around: if a friend wishes you a happy birthday, do you know or care how and why they remembered?

True. If someone wished me happy birthday I would be glad. On the other side, however, I've already sent countless happy birthdays, merry christmases, and happy new years. Every time I do it I have this gut feeling of inauthenticity. I think to myself, "do I really care about these people". I'm just basically trying to figure out if this is my personal issue or if anyone else feel the same way. Thanks for the respons…

There is an opportunity to reconnect with someone every time you do it. I think that's what draws people to practices such as sending cards. Another way to reconnect is sending out a letter with a short blurb about how you're doing and inviting the recipient to respond back with a short blurb about how they're doing.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#169

Post by meonkeys »

tomgs wrote: post #79

I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread. Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working. Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of…

When you use Monica, do you add and change data directly in Monica (manually)? Or in some scripted/automated fashion?

I looked through the docs and didn't find anything about integrating/importing/exporting. I found lots of open feature requests for integrations.

I've carefully curated contacts and meetings in my Nextcloud instance, so of course I'd like to leverage all that work. I added my thumbs-up to https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/1444

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#170

Post by wil5for »

sails wrote: post #138
wil5for wrote: post #102

I recently developed my own app to solve the same problem, I call the Personal CRM a “PRM” (link here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id14... ) The privacy comments elsewhere in the thread resonated with me, but I think self hosting is too large a barrier for most users. I decided to build Prim by leveraging iCloud’s local/cloud CoreData storage. This approach ensures I never have access to u…

I tried the app, it crashes quite frequently, but seems like a very neat integration with iOS and I would consider using it if I could understand how data mobility is handled per my other comment. Thanks!

Thanks for checking it out!

Are you using iOS 14? After the upgrade I’ve seen an increase in crashes for CloudKit storage. Hope to have a fix out soon.

I will follow up on the data mobility in your other comment.

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