Spreadsheeting Your Friendships
There’s a category of things in this life that we aren’t supposed to treat like data, like love and relationships. People think it's off-putting to treat people like a transaction, like a line in a spreadsheet.
However, I firmly believe that you should lead your personal life with an intentionality and deliberateness that we do in other parts of our life. At work, we are held accountable for the growth we can bring to the business. In life, we should hold ourselves accountable for our personal growth and development. If we want relationships to grow, then we need to understand the baseline of how things are today, and have a vision for where we want to go. Then, we need to develop steps to get from A-to-B.
Over time, I've learned that my natural tendency is to fall deeply into work. If I’m not careful — I’ll work late and long hours. For many years, I watched as friendships faded away as I dug myself deeper into my job.
Some people have argued to me that if it’s important to you, you’ll make time for it, but making time for things doesn't just magically happen. There are plenty of things that I know are valuable that I don’t make time for. It’s easy to let life pass you by when you’re focused on the day-to-day.
So, one day I sat down, and looked at how I wanted to cultivate stronger bonds with friends. Today, I share my imperfect process.
- Choose people in your network that you want to deepen your relationships with. These can be people who you already have a strong relationship with, but it can also be people who are just acquaintances that you want to become closer to.
- Realistically evaluate how much time you want to spend on friendships. It takes time to genuinely deepen relationships, and it's best to actually set some time aside on a weekly basis to spend time with people.
- Categorize friendships into how frequently you'd like to see them. These often correspond with how deeply I want these friendships to develop. I started with friends I wanted to see every other week, once a month, quarterly, and annually, but since moved to once every 3 weeks, once every 6 weeks, and bi-annually. Seeing someone only quarterly seemed like a ridiculously long time inbetween seeing them, but some of my closest friends I only see that often. Sometimes proximity or mutualyl busy schedules just prevents more frequent hangouts from happening.
- Every time you hang out with these friends, add the date you got together into a cell on your spreadsheet
- Color code the cell according to how you think the get-together affected the relationship. I color red if it was pretty much just status quo. Yellow if I felt the relationship deepened a little, and green if I think it substantially moved the relationship forward.
Here's what it looks like for me in 2015.
Names obviously eliminated to prevent super awkwardness.
Column A is a list of my friends, bucketed into a level of frequency that I target to see them. Every time we do hang out, I add a date to the cell of the row with their name Empty yellow boxes represent that I need to schedule something with them and it's been a while since we hung out. If boxes have a date and are not color coded, it's just cuz I got lazy.
What appears is a bar graph of your relationships. Looking at this data helps surface some insights about my friendships that I couldn’t see otherwise.
- It tells me who I choose to spend my time with
- It tells me the quality of my interactions
- It tells me who I haven’t seen in a while — and prompts me to schedule something with them.
- It shows me the gap between my desire to hang out with them and the actual results - which is important to understand so that we know how to improve.
As a result of doing this for a couple years, I've developed several actionable things I do to strengthen relationships
- If the data shows that I wanted to deepen my relationship with someone, but I haven't actually scheduled something, it prompts me to evaluate the friendship - What is preventing me from reaching out to them? Then, I either immediately set something up, or remove them from the list.
- I also discovered that while I prefer to see people 1:1, I have too many people who I want to deepen my relationship with. Therefore, I have to plan more group things or reduce the number of people on this list. In a given week, I probably have somewhere between 6–10 hours to see friends. If I restrict my get-togethers with my friends to a 1:1 2 hour catch up through a dinner, that’s only 12–20 friends that I see once a month.
- I discovered that 1-hour catch up dinners don't feel like I'm deepening the relationship very much. I need more substantial time with them to feel like we've grown closer.
- This list also constantly evolves. As I meet new people and take a realistic look at my schedule, people move from different buckets, added to the list, or removed from the list entirely. I wish I had the time to better deepen all my relationships, but the reality is that I have to make choices and focus on quality over quantity.
I debated writing this for quite some time, for fear that people would see me as someone who just views friendships as a data point — transactional. However, after doing this for the past 2 years, I’ve seen a much better balance in work/life. I’ve deepened many more friendships, and surfaced much more about who I want to spend my life with. This system forces me to critically look at areas of my life most people don't intentionally spend time on.
My second hesitation in posting this is because I know there will be friends who read this that I haven't seen in a while, wondering where you're categorized, or thinking that I might see your friendship as valuable. For many, there are people that I genuinely love their company, and I don't see as much as I should. I think that's because sometime's I'm at a loss of what to do with them. I'm developing ways to combat that.
I don't expect everyone to start spreadsheeting your friendships like me, but I do challenge you to look at your friendships more critically. Develop your own way to accurately measure your own relationships so that you have a baseline of what's happening today. Then, picture your ideal life, and if there's a gap, be genuine and deliberate about closing it.
Think this is super weird? Let me know in the comments. That type of feedback helps me get better as a person and I genuinely want to hear it.