The ping cadence: how often to reach out, by relationship tier

When people resolve to keep in touch better, they usually pick a single rule - message someone every week, reach out to one person a day - and apply it across the board. It collapses within a month, and for a structural reason: relationships don't share a natural frequency. A weekly nudge is far too often for the colleague you met once at a conference and far too rare for your closest friend in a hard season. Force one pace on both and you'll smother the conference contact and under-serve the friend. The fix isn't more discipline; it's different cadences for different tiers.

A simple tiering covers almost everyone. Inner circle (a small handful - closest friends, family you're near, a partner): no fixed cadence, because gravity keeps these alive; a tool here is for the life events, not the nudge. Close ties (good friends you'd be sad to lose touch with): roughly monthly to quarterly. Weak ties (people you'd be glad to hear from but won't initiate with - old colleagues, conference contacts, friends-of-friends): yearly. Dormant (relationships you've consciously let rest): never - kept on file for context, not for contact. Most of your network is in the weak-tie band, and yearly is the right default there.

The fear with any cadence is that scheduled contact reads as scheduled - that the receiver can smell the calendar reminder behind your message. The resolution is to separate the two jobs the cadence does. The cadence decides when a person resurfaces in your field of view; it never decides what you write. When a yearly nudge fires, you don't send a templated check-in - you look at what you logged last time, find the genuine thread, and reach out only if there's something real to say. If there isn't, the cadence was a prompt to think of them, nothing more. Warmth lives in the specifics you write, which the schedule never touches.

Tiers aren't permanent assignments; they're a snapshot of where a relationship sits right now. A close tie moves to weak as someone relocates and the rhythm naturally slows. A weak tie jumps to close when you start a project together. A dormant relationship reopens after a chance encounter. The model only works if you let people move between tiers freely, without it feeling like a demotion or a verdict. The cleanest sign a tier is wrong: someone keeps surfacing overdue and you keep skipping them. That's not a discipline failure - it's the cadence telling you they belong a tier looser. Move them and the guilt evaporates.

Holding four different cadences across dozens of people is exactly the kind of bookkeeping a brain does badly and a tool does well. Contact Book lets you set a cadence per person - monthly, quarterly, yearly, never - and the dashboard surfaces only who's actually overdue, so you never have to compute the schedule yourself. Moving someone between tiers is a single change. The tiers are yours to decide; the arithmetic of who's due this week is what the tool quietly carries, which is the difference between a model that sounds nice and one you actually keep using past February.