Michal Bednarski
IT’S 8.18 am on a Wednesday when my phone buzzes with a prompt to “Offer your knowledge to others”. The push notification also tells me that I have “three relationships to reach out to”, including, in brackets, the name of my sister, and “four new people” to “discover” – here it mentions someone I recently emailed for work. I ignore it, then click snooze on several other reminders to reach out to my friends.
The message is from UpHabit, one of many apps that have launched in the past couple of years to help people better manage their relationships. They are based on customer relationship management software, or CRMs, which are now routinely used by companies for things like compiling customer data and offering up suggestions on how to retain business. These new apps, personal CRMs, offer similar services, but the relationships they help you “manage” are with your friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances.
In an era when people tend to move house or job multiple times, making and neglecting relationships as they go, these tools promise to help us stay in touch – and be better, more thoughtful friends. Yet how many people can we genuinely stay connected to? And if I send a message to someone because an app prompted me to, is it less meaningful somehow than if I remember myself?
To understand why so many personal CRMs, or PRMs, have popped up since 2018, what that says about our relationships and whether push notifications can really make us better friends, I gave a few a try. It didn’t go quite as I expected.
If these kinds of apps …
