"A Personal CRM in Plain Markdown: To Remember Friends, Coworkers and Family"

Everybody is talking about “ LifeOS” or fancy “Personal AI setups”, Nathan Barry on the pod with Dan Shipper says that he has an agent that gets each contact he tapped on his phone on a conference and adds it to his system (what system?), so he has all the people he meets.

This is cool and all, but how do you separate the memorable from the non-memorable? You’ll end up with a huge list of people, with no memory of who they were or what they did, except location and when, which is great and all, don’t get me wrong, but imagine a different approach.

You meet a person, quickly open Obsidian¹, type in their name (or what you remember, you can always complete later, when the person has resurfaced by itself or you want to add more in-depth insight you got or discussed), and use a template that fills in the created date, log, and name (see my template below). You fill in Origin: the place you met, and two or three comments on what you talked about, or what was memorable. You can also do that in the evening or later.

The huge difference here is that you have it in your notes, or Second Brain, and it will resurface with the links you added automatically, or when you meet this person again, you just add another log entry, or other links or books that person wrote, etc.

I have notes that grew from single small notes to a full note as we became friends or coworkers. And the beauty is that each person is just a Markdown file (see more below on why this works best with Obsidian).

This is my Personal CRM, something that’s done more intentionally. I’ve been doing that for 5+ years, and it’s served me so well! Sure it takes a little more time, but it’s much more meaningful, and helps more in the long run. Less Shallow Work, as Cal Newport says, but more intentionally, slowly.

In more detail, this is the template and workflow I use for ‘people notes’ in my second brain.

A simple note in Obsidian and a Obsidian Templater that I fill out; origin (date, etc is automatic. Why we don’t need AI for this: we don’t know what it stored; instead of us putting what we remember and liked about a person, we also miss some because we didn’t find them too interesting or didn’t connect. This is much more valuable!)

This is my 👱 People Human Note Template:

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# Name

## Agenda
*latest follow-up or questions i want to ask*
## Log

### today's date
- what he told me [[very important new thing]]
- some links..

---
Origin: 
References: reminds me of X
Tag: #humans
Created [[Today's date filled automatically]]

Auto move it into the People’s folder

I have added a Templater code so that the note gets automatically forwarded in the People folder with (not added above):
<%* await tp.file.move("💡 Resources/👥 People/Humans/" + tp.file.title); %>

PS: above I named it Tag instead of Tags, as otherwise my Quartz framework would remove it.

That’s it, next time when I search for the person or come across a connecting link, they naturally resurface when needed. I do that not only for conferences, but also for friends, family, and everyone I like or find insightful, to Learn for Life.

I use Obsidian for this, you can use any Note Taking App. Obsidian works well because everything is connected, and you make links with Wikilinks like on Wikipedia. Now you can connect the people with your work, or your personal interest, whatever is in your Vault or note-taking app already, which is how life works. People connect with life.

A huge other benefit: everything is based on plain Markdown files, or just Plaintext Files. Meaning you will always be able to access your data, unlike Notion or other apps that can increase the price, lock your account, or go bankrupt, as well as storing it in a proprietary format, where you don’t know if it will still be possible to read in years to come. I had a hard experience with 10 years of OneNote notes that I barely managed to export to Markdown, as you can imagine, only a fraction of the notes could be used, and lots of notes were lost. I touch more on this in my blog on Ten Years of Writing in Public: Why I still Blog.

This comes in extremely handy when you go to conferences, and you can make a list beforehand of who you’ll meet, some are online friends, some are new ones.

Some you might have a note already, and when linking them, you get all the context to that person, all relevant to what you found interesting. And you can imagine how the graph and connections, and therefore ideas, start to grow, with all the history in place, almost like Blockchain.

All based on Markdown, linked to my work, hobbies, or a new idea that person gave me. That works great, because that’s also how we learn, how our brain works. When we learn new things, we form new synapse², so by connecting notes, we do a similar activity, and it helps us learn and remember long term.

I do the same for my clients, I create one single note and manage my CRM for business with Obsidian. This is a bit more advanced, with Kanban for articles written and sales funnels, etc., see Managing My Business with Obsidian.

• Personal Data Warehouse like Dogsheep, Why I put my whole life into a single database, and more.
• Keep AI Out of Your Obsidian Vault
  • Karpathy LLM Wiki
• Obsidian Local Graph: Is it Useful?
• Mesh suggested by Ben
  • Kuddos and otherthings is just saw on Mesh is in my “system” just a note, such as My Praises WORK (People saying nice things), or 🏆 My Achievements, because sometimes we forget what we achieved over the years, so it’s good to look back sometimes, and be humble.

Origin: Dan Shipper.
Category: Second Brain & Digital Garden