Introduction

You know people, right?

From your family, your friends, colleagues to aquaintences and random people you once met or saw.

However many people you know or are close with and however the people you know are distributed across these different categories of types of relationships, all these people you know form your personal social network.

Intentionally building this network so that you get all the benefits of social interactions is a whole topic of itself, which we are going to talk about in a future post.

In this blog-post though, we are taking a look at how to maintain your personal social network and the system allowing you to do so - the Social Network Maintenance System (S.N.M.S.)

This post covers...

1. 🕳️ The Problem
2. 🚀 The Solution
3. 🗄️ Part I: Social Tiers
4. 🖋️ Part II: Strategies & Guidelines
5. 📜 Part III: Social Contracts
6. ☠️ Part IV: The Blacklist
7. 🌍 Conclusion

The Problem

Do you know this feeling? There is a set of people you really care about, people who mean a lot to you and people whom you feel a deep connection with.

But for a range of reasons, you struggle to keep in touch with them, struggle to show them how much they mean to you and as a result struggle to keep the relationships alive.

From practical and logistical causes like a lack of time commitment to more abstract causes like not knowing how to reach out to people after a longer time or not feeling comfortable with communicating your situation transparently - there is this struggle to maintain your network of relationships.

Inevitably, your relationships become fragile, there is a constant uncertainty about the status of these relationships and even if you do manage to reach out, it feels like a chore, because you feel like you have to reach out to keep the relationship alive - as if it was some kind of homework to hand in before the deadline.

And so despite your best intentions and your acknowledgement of the importance and value both privately & emotionally as well as professionally & economically of realtionships - managing and maintaining the relationships in your real life unfortunately just doesn't seem to work if you approach it completly naturally and oraganically.

The solution

Although it may sound a bit cold, I believe the best way to counter this problem is by allowing ourselves to step away from the utopian belief that social interactions and relationships must always work completely naturally and instead accepting the fact that putting some time into developing a proper strategy and system for managing relationships may sound a bit cold at first, but ultimately is how relationships can properly be maintained in the reality of the mess that is called life.

Part I: Social Tiers

The idea behind social tiers is not to obsessively categorise the people you know into fixed groups which they have to stay in for the rest of their life. We are not living in the Middle Ages after all.

Instead, there is a different origin to the idea of structuring your social network by social tiers:

When you think about the people you know, isn't there are specific set of people you think about first?

Those people are probably either the ones your are closest with, or the ones you spend the most time with, both of these types together, or maybe also the people who have a significantly negative impact on you.

Regardless, there is a collection of people who are most relevant to your social life - both from a timely as well as from an emotional point of view.

The core idea of structuring your social network by social tiers boils down to this simple fact: You know a lot of people. But some of them have a much bigger impact on you than others.

As pretty much always, the pareto distribution comes in handy. 20% of the people you know are responsible for 80% of the volume of your social interactions, are the ones whom you share the most meaningful conversations & interactinos with and are also the ones whom you think about the most.

What do we take away from this?

Whilst relationships of course develop and change in an often unpredictable way, it is still quite clear: Of all the people we know, there will always be a small minority who are most relevant and influential to the experience of your life.

Taking a strategic approach on maintaining relationships, this means we need to ask ourselves who these people are, grouping them together and making sure we invest the most time and energy into nurturing and developing those relationships, instead of trying to maintain every single person in the bulk of our social network equally.

Returning to the initial idea of social tiers, practically, it is about making a list of tiers and liberally categorising the people you know into those categories to both get an overview over the people you know, the different types of relationships you have and to be able to channel your social efforts on those people who are most important and most relevant to you.

You can create these tiers however you like and you can choose freely whether you want to have a lot of tiers or only a few. There are also different ways to create social tiers. You can create them...

1. by area of life (family, friends, work, hobby, ...)
2. by the depth and meaning of the relationship (most inner circle, real friends, deal friends, acquaintances, ...)
3. by the timely volume of interactions
4. or by a collection of these different ways

Part II: Strategies & Guidelines

The second part of the S.N.M.S. are strategies and guidelines. This links back to Part I and the understanding that some relationships deserve more of your efforts than others.

Strategies and guidelines are about being clear on how you prioritise and in general, whom you spend your time and energy on.

How or if you document these strategies or guidelines is up to you.

As an example, you could start by thinking about how much time you want to invest in social interactions. Say you want to commit to x hours a week of intentional social interactions. You could then define liberal guidelines on how you want to delegate this time. For example, you could say roughly 65% of this time you want to spend with your closest circle of people, 10% of this you want to commit to maintaining day to day relationships that may not mean that much to you but are important nevertheless, and the remaining 25% you want to spend on either meeting new people or on getting closer with people you want to become close with but aren't at the moment.

Fundamentally, it's about this one question: Have you done some strategic thinking on how you want to go about living out your social life?

This is what social strategies and guidelines are about.

Part III: Social Contracts

Put shortly, Social contracts are agreements between two or more people on the specifications of their relationship.

This could include various points such as:

• type of relationship (romantic, friendship, professional, benefit-orientied, ...)
• time commitment
• frequency of interaction
• general rules of interaction
• specific rules for disagreements or fights
• a shared understanding of the function of the relationship
• a shared understanding of the meaning of the relationship
• expectations each party has of the other party or parties

This idea of social contracts probably feels uncomfortable to many.

But whether or not these social contracts come in the form of actual written agreements or alternatively are just oral agreements, I believe there are great benefits to be found in social contracts.

The most important one is certainty. Social contracts build upon an honest and authentic conversation about what a given relationship even is, its function & purpose and how the different parties think and feel about the relationship.

In the example of a relationship of two friends who care deeply about each other but don't have the means or capacities to visit each other often, a social contract can clarify to both parties that each party takes the relationship seriously independent of the fact that the volume and frequency of interactions may not seem to match it.

Part IV: The Blacklist

The last part of the S.N.M.S. is arguably one of the most important ones

The idea behind a social blacklist is to be very honest and clear with yourself about the people whom you specifically do not want to be a part of your social network.

For whatever reasons it may be, the blacklist gives you a space to dump relationships that have a significant negative impact on you.

This does not mean that blacklist people cannot return to the actively maintained part of your social network. But it means there are specific reasons why those people should be avoided for the time being.

Ideally and if appropriate in the given situation, you may even want to tell the people on your blacklist that you don't want to further interact with them. This way, you can draw a clear line and shift your focus on other more important relationships again.

Conclusion

Whether or not we are willing to accept it, the truth is that the social interactions we have deeply influence the experience of our lives.

But despite us living in crowded cities and spending so much time talking to so many different people every single day, there seems to be a lack of communication on both the topic of forming but also the topic of maintaining relationships.

The consequence?

We spend a lot of time with people but struggle to form relationships. We know a lot of people but feel lonely. We use cheap and superficial digital relationships to try to escape, only to realize that we have become nervous to look a real person across the table in the eye.

The Social Network Maintenance System (S.N.M.S.) provides a systematic approach for taking our relationships seriously again and for making the most of these valuable friends, partners and companions we have already been blessed enough to cross paths with.