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.

Tiers are the model; here are the numbers most people land on once they stop guessing. These are defaults to start from, not laws - the right cadence is the one a given relationship can carry without feeling forced. Note that the inner circle has no number on purpose: with the few people gravity already keeps close, a scheduled ping is the wrong instrument; you watch for life events instead. Everyone else gets a loose default, and the further out the tier, the looser it goes.

The tiered model isn't arbitrary; it tracks how relationships actually behave. Robin Dunbar's work describes friendship as layered - a roughly five-person support clique, a fifteen-person sympathy group, an fifty-person band, and the famous outer ring near a hundred and fifty - with each layer needing markedly less contact than the one inside it. His research also points to a sobering decay rule: without meaningful contact roughly every couple of weeks, a close friendship tends to slide outward to a looser layer. That's the structural reason a single frequency fails - the layers simply don't share one. A weekly cadence that's right for a sympathy-group friend would smother a hundredth acquaintance, and a yearly one that suits the acquaintance would quietly let the close friend drift.

Time is the other half of the picture. Jeffrey Hall's research on how friendships form found it takes a real investment of hours to deepen a tie - very roughly on the order of fifty hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend, around ninety to reach friend, and two hundred or more to become a close friend. The lesson for cadence is that closeness is bought in hours of genuine contact, and a tier set too loose simply never accumulates them. Used together, the two findings explain the whole model: Hall tells you closeness costs sustained time, Dunbar tells you it decays without upkeep - so you spend your finite attention by tier, heavily where the relationship is close and lightly where it isn't. See Dunbar and the modern network for how the layers map onto a tracked contact list.

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.