Building a Personal CRM with Notion

Introduction:

• Personal CRM for managing meaningful relationships
• Two key components: reminding us to keep in touch with important people and easy to update and maintain

Must-have Information:

• Basic details: name, relationship, birthday, industry, location, VIP status
• Extra details for VIPs: description, last interaction, next steps

Other Tips:

• Capture birthdays on to-do list and set reminders on Notion and Google Calendar
• Use tags to classify relationships (e.g. friends, family, colleagues)
• Industry and location properties can be useful for networking
• Create database views and toggle off unnecessary properties
• Extra details for VIPs: description, last interaction, next steps, notes
• Use Notion's integration with Google Calendar to schedule events with contacts

Conclusion:

• Personal CRM helps us keep track of important details about our close friends, family, and professional network
• By being strategic about which people we include additional information for, we can make the personal CRM easier to use and maintain

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When life gets busy, we need to be reminded to enjoy our most meaningful relationships. However, sometimes managing our contacts can be a tedious task. After inputting information like email, phone number, LinkedIn, company, role, and even the names of pets for just one person, we may realize that no amount of friendship is worth the effort.

To solve this problem, I've developed a personal CRM template on Notion that I've been successfully maintaining for the past six months. A personal CRM (personal relationship management system) helps us keep track of important details about our close friends, family, and professional network so we don't lose touch with them.

In my experience, a good personal CRM needs to have two things: the ability to remind us to keep in contact with the people we care about, and the ability to be easy to update and maintain. My template does both of these things by being strategic about which people we include additional information for. We can drastically decrease the friction of using the personal CRM by only including extra details for a select few VIPs. This doesn't mean that non-VIPs are not important, but rather that we already keep up with them on a regular basis and don't need to be reminded to catch up with them.

The must-have information for all contacts includes basic details like name, relationship, birthday, industry, location, and whether or not they are a VIP. For VIPs, we have additional properties such as a description, last interaction, and next steps. At any given point, I usually have five or fewer VIPs to keep things manageable.

It's important to note the birthday of our contacts whenever possible because following up on this one piece of information can bring two people closer together. To do this, I capture the birthday on my to-do list app and set a reminder on Notion and Google Calendar to wish them a happy birthday.

I do both because right now, Notion currently does not have a recurring date feature, but it's good to have all the birthdays in a centralized location.

Moving over to the relationships property. I personally have six tags here: friends, family, colleagues, school, high school, and college network and services. Services being like renovation or moving companies.

What's important to note here is that these tags are not mutually exclusive. Someone can be both my friend and colleague or my friend and part of my professional network. And this is where your own personal definition comes in. For example, for the people I've tagged as friend are those who I feel comfortable grabbing a drink with. For the network tag, it will be for professional contacts I may want to reach out to at some point in the future. For example, a colleague who left for a company I may wanna join down the line.

And here's my first pro tip. Be honest with yourself, right? This personal CRM is for you. No one else is got to see this. So give yourself permission to not tag that annoying teammate as a friend.

The industry and location properties are pretty self-explanatory. I purposely chose industry instead of company, because people might be changing companies all the time, every two to three years, but people rarely jump into an entirely new industry. And when you network, starting with people in your target industry is usually good enough.

Once all these must have properties are filled out, simply create a few database views around your objectives. For example, for colleagues, I sometimes organize happy hours at work. And I wanna make sure I'm not forgetting anyone. Pro tip here. To keep things clean, you might wanna toggle off some of the properties you don't need to see for that view. And for sort, I usually sort by birthday ascending so I know whose birthday is coming up next.

Now onto the VIP properties. There are a total of four extra things you need to input for VIPs. First is the last contacted date. Whether you caught up with them in person or sent them a short email, record the exact date that happened. And for this view, I like to actually sort by last contacted date ascending.

The status column is a formula I stole from the Notion teams CRM template. And it basically just says, if the time between today and the last time you contacted them is more than three months, return the words hit them up. Otherwise, you're good. Obviously, you can customize this by changing the number of months here and the words are return if the conditions are met.

And the last update property here is just a one sentence summary of what you two discussed the last time you talked. The fourth VIP specific action is to fill out additional information on their respective pages. I've broken this down to three sections: background, contact information, and notes.

For background, this is very self-explanatory, not gonna go over this. For contact information, the one thing I like to mention here is that since we all use so many different messaging apps nowadays, you might wanna remind yourself what's the main app you're using with that person since he or she may be more responsive on a particular platform.

For notes, you have two options. You can either create an empty Notion page every time we talk and write down the highlights there, or you can just simply input bullet points under a date like this. I've actually already created this template within this database. So all you need to do is to simply add a new person for each VIP.

There is no strict definition of a VIP, but in short, these are the people you want to intentionally keep up with on a regular basis. These could be family, friends you don't see often, mentors who left your team or a company, your current manager or director, and college friends who ended up in fields completely different from yours.

To maintain your personal CRM so you can build meaningful relationships, you can do as-needed and scheduled maintenance. For as-needed maintenance, add birthdays to your Notion template and Google Calendar as soon as you find out. For planned meetings, like one-on-one networking calls or coffee chats, take five minutes afterwards to jot down the highlights so you don't forget.

For scheduled maintenance, set aside 30 minutes every two weeks to remind yourself who you've met. If someone is worthy, add them to your personal CRM and fill in the necessary columns. Within this 30-minute timeframe, you should also go into VIP view and schedule catch-ups as needed. Remember to keep the number of VIPs within a manageable range and add or remove VIPs depending on your goals at the time.

One last benefit of using a tool like Notion is that it is available across all platforms, not just tied to any one operating system. This is a limitation that Google or Apple contacts may face.

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