[tomgs]

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 software made all the difference re keeping up with people. The e-mail notifications is a killer feature - so simple, yet I've never done it before in my personal inbox.

I think the fact that it's an external service and not inside your inbox matters from a UX perspective. I have this other place where I define the logic, and then receive it in the screen I look at every morning.

Originally came to know of the project years back through https://sive.rs/hundreds, and while he's a bit better (a lot better) at it than I am, I can confidently say I've stayed in touch with dozens of people thanks to Monica. His notion of "ranked lists" also makes sense, at least to me, as a mental framework for managing personal contacts.

Shameless plug (for the creators!): I 100% recommend Monica, have contributed to it, and am a big big supporter of https://github.com/djaiss (Regis), https://github.com/asbiin (Alexis), et al.

They're actively working on something new now, so if that helps them somehow - link incoming:

https://www.officelife.io/

A personal comment: There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated.

Example: Say I met someone years ago at school, and I thought she was pretty cool. I added her to Monica and I reach out to her once in a while to see what's up. We talk about work, exchange some personal stories, and go our separate ways. I might not think about her for months at a time, but then - quite intentionally - I think about her when the email notification comes up. It makes me happy that this person is somehow in my life.

Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake.

If it works, right?

[brtkdotse]

> There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated.

I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills.

It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit.

[ALittleLight]

I have a friend who does this. It used to be that every year or so he would come out to where I live for a convention he liked to go to and he would stay at my house for 3-4 days and we'd catch up, go do some stuff in the evening when he wasn't at the convention, etc.

One year he resolved to "do better about keeping up" - apparently feeling bad that our entire message history was him texting me a month before the convention asking if he could stay with me, and me saying that he could. True to his word, ever after that, he has periodically texted me every few months just to make idle conversation. He even stopped going to the convention but still keeps messaging me periodically - which I appreciate because it shows he didn't view me only as a hotel replacement.

Still, I prefer our old arrangement. Frankly, I don't need to know how he is doing every few months and I find it a bit awkward to make small talk any way. As I just have one friend that does this it's not so bad, but if I had more friends who wanted to just regularly "check in" like this, I'd have to start blocking people, ending friendships, or developing an automated routine to tell the curious that I'm doing well and to ask about their family and our mutual friends, etc.

[tomgs]

> Frankly, I don't need to know how he is doing every few months and I find it a bit awkward to make small talk any way.

There's a bit of secret sauce here that I tend to rely on to prevent myself from being considered "that guy".

First and foremost, I do this as much as possible via e-mail. Phone or WhatsApp is indeed too "personal" for these type of things (save for one person, an old boss of mine, who I have a scheduled zoom call with once a month. But that's just because he and I just like the chit-chat, it appears).

I write up a long-form message, something like 5-8 paragraphs with real news about myself and the things I've been up to, and ship that alongside the usual casual chit-chat.

It's surprisingly useful - I think this is the only context in which long-form e-mail is a good thing.

But then again, I grew up in an era where e-mail is the devil, and this was not always the case (or so they tell me).

[hammock]

What strikes me as the secret sauce there is the 5-8 paragraphs of info that gets dumped at once. There is something value in there that the other can pick up on and continue the thread.

Compare that to a text , where you might send a sentence or two and expect them to come back with something- when in fact, they weren't thinking about YOU and therefore aren't prepared to respond. Hence awkward.

[tomgs]

Yep, yep. Makes all the difference.

Liking to write helps a lot with keeping in touch.

[ath92]

I think the resistance towards that particular book is because the full title is "How to win friends and influence people". The last part in particular is what makes it sound sleazy. It would be very different if the book had just been called "How to make friends".

[brtkdotse]

The book was published in 1936. I think the meaning of the word “influence” has evolved to mean something more sinister than what the book is about.

[weinzierl]

> It would be very different if the book had just been called "How to make friends".

I think it is the other way round. People criticize it because "How to make friends" is the first and more prominent part of the title, while the book is not primarily about that. "How to influence people" fits the content much better than "How to win friends" but "influence" isn't the most appropriate word either and I guess that would not have sold the book nearly as well as its actual title.

Apart from that I think there is nothing to criticize about the content, it might be trivial to a degree, but it is solid and ethical advice, if I remember it correctly.

[Kye]

I only read a few chapters of the 1981 revision, but the author always made sure to emphasize that all the tools and techniques were boosters for good intentions, not a replacement for them.

[Ma8ee]

I think many people read the title as “How to befriend people to influence them.”

[bucephale]

Actually, the french translation or this book has got the title "how to make friend" (comment se faire des amis)

[tomgs]

> It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit.

Exactly. I have this thing that I'm not good at. I have this tool I use to be better at it. Everybody wins.

One might say that computers in general are tools for computational work, since people are not as good at crunching numbers in their head at a consistent, repetitive and deterministic fashion over time.

One might even be right. :)

[wh-uws]

I figured out how to deal with cognitive dissonance people are feeling about this years ago.

I would rather make a calendar invite / use <insert your fav software> and remember to call <valued loved one or friend> and feel bad about having to do that...

Then forget to call and feel worse about forgetting.

[tomgs]

> Then forget to call and feel bad about forgetting.

This. I feel really, really guilty if I hear something great or awful happened to someone I used to be in touch with, but the relationship faded away into the flow of life.

Why wasn't I there? What? It's been 3 years since we last talked? How did that happen?

So, no to all that jazz. Enter Monica. :)

[throwaway_pdp09]

for some reason you omitted the sleazier half of the title "...and influence people".

Improving social skills and using them manipulatively are entirely different things. If you've ever known or worked with psychopaths you'll get that immediately. I suppose there's a continuum but still.

[monsieurbanana]

I don't agree. Influencing and social skills cannot be dissociated. Making friends is the process of making a person like you, which seems to fall under the definition of influence.

As many things, influencing people isn't inherently bad, but depends on how and why.

[brtkdotse]

Have you read the book? It’s very far from being sleazy or manipulative, but rather a guide to what people tend to think are agreeable qualities.

[throwaway_pdp09]

Fair enough, I have not and was going on hearsay, but from wikipedia "As time passed however, scholarly reviews became more critical, chiding Carnegie for being insincere and manipulative" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influen...)

And it also says "Charles Manson used what he learned from the book in prison to manipulate women into killing on his behalf" but I don't know if that can be blamed on the book.

[dvtrn]

I have not and was going on hearsay

This is unfortunate.

[terpimost]

I wonder what are another 2 tools in your stack?

[tomgs]

Ah, personal stacks. What a wonderful topic to spend a late night writing session on.

I am not really into self-hosting and homelabs, in the sense that I never got too deep into the proper architecture of it all and the "right" way of doing things. I find that when I'm creating tooling (or setting up tooling, for that matter) for myself, the only thing that matters is speed of setup and ease of use. Hosted is fine for many things if it's decoupled in a sensible way from your public identity or does not actually reveal anything that interesting about you, IMHO, but I assume that would be an unpopular opinion.

A corollary from this "proposition" is that I leave the world of software often. For things that I have yet to find proper software for, but are indeed great needs that I have in my day to day life, I find my ways.

Going back to your question, I'll admit the other two tools are a bit underwhelming.

I'm a religious nail biter, and the only thing that ever made me stop was jotting in a pad every time I want to bite. I usually keep a small pad (as in a mini-notebook) in my backpack and draw hashtags and lines in it when I'm seeing the habit return. I'm now going through something a bit difficult personally, and while I'm constantly biting right now I know that when it will really bother me I can pull up the pad and stop biting again. It's stupid, I know, but again - it works for me. I got the idea from a book, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit).

The other one is the Hacker's Diet Online (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html) - it's a weight watching tool by the guy who built AutoCad. I lost ±24 pounds after reading his book (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) and have been tracking my weight ever since (±2 years).

One recurring thing in my stack, as you noticed, is tracking. I am an AVID tracker of many things, and generally speaking advise anyone who is in a loop over something to do the same.

It simply... works.

If anyone wants to talk personal tracking, it's not hard to find me on the internets (TomGranot in most places except here). I have a plethora of ideas & opinions on the subject.

[_alex_]

I hadn’t seen The Hackers Diet. reading it now. about 1/3 of the way through and it’s really great. thanks for the link!

[Throwaway1771]

Guessing something like NextCloud/Gitea.

[jstummbillig]

That is... an oddly random guess.

[privong]

I'm not sure. It seems like a fairly normal combination of things for people who self-host. My stack is pretty much the same, except I use gogs instead of gitea, and I'd add `Lychee` for photo sharing.

[bengale]

> Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake.

I agree with you, I do something like this on a much smaller scale to try and keep up with who I have and haven't spoken to recently. I have a lot going on and time seems to slip past me, I can easily go weeks without talking to people and it feel like no time at all. Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me.

[tomgs]

> Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me.

I actually think it's more genuine to care enough to write down to call somebody instead of letting it slip by you. Being determined to build the tooling to be good at something doesn't have to stay within the professional realm - it should extend to personal life as well.

[meonkeys]

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

[tomgs]

There was this notion of a mobile app for a minute there - https://github.com/monicahq/chandler - which I think might've been super duper awesome, but open source is hard.

I would 100% use that over the desktop app if it was stable.

Re automated / scripted vs. manual - manual all the way. I keep on mentioning to folks this study I read years ago about teachers who had a student tracking system in their school.

The key point from the study was that the teachers who found the system useful are not the ones who got the most detailed or relevant reports, but the ones who actually INTERACTED with the tracking process. Some sort of "obligation" feeling or something drove them to look at the data and then utilize the learnings from it, IIRC.

If anyone remembers such a study I'd be happy to get a link to it.

[Deivuh]

I also started using this tool a couple of years back, when it was posted on product hunt, and I found it pretty useful. I can say it had saved me time and frustration whenever I forgot a name or a detail about an acquaintance.

I had completely forgotten about this, in fact I had been using the notes field on the contacts app, but thanks to this post I’m going back to it again.

What are the other top two of your personal stack?

[tomgs]

Then I have done my job as a member of Monica's community right. Happy to see you with us!

Re your question, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283008.