One of my New Year’s resolutions this year will be to do a better job of keeping in touch with friends and to do so on a more regular basis.

I just spent twenty minutes implementing a system that will send me regular reminders to keep in touch with specific friends. Here’s what I did:

1) In a word processor, I put together a list of the friends I want to do a better job of keeping up with.
2) I split those into three groups: ping every month, ping every 6 weeks, and ping every 2 months.
3) In my google calendar, I created a new event for each person on the list, with each occurring on a different day in January. I titled the event ‘KIT: [friend’s name]’ (KIT = Keep in Touch) and I positioned the event at the top of the given day (i.e. not at a specific time).
4) For each calendar event:

a) Make it repeat either every month, every six weeks, or every nine weeks, depending on where the person fell on your original list.
b) Set a reminder to receive an email 0 minutes ahead of time. This will mean I’ll receive the email at midnight each day.

The important step going forward will be to not disregard these emails that will start coming in very regularly in January. I’ll report back on my progress.