A Personal Private CRM

Last month I forgot to call my dad on his birthday. It's certainly not the first time I have forgotten something important. I'm not wired in the necessary way to piece together all the important bits of information that would make me "thoughtful". Maybe that's a red herring and I'm just not a thoughtful person, but I'd like to think that's not the case and life just gets in the way like I'm sure many reading this can sympathize.

Today I came across a really interesting application called Monica and while I'm certainly reticent throw software at all my problems, I can't deny the possibility that having a smartphone or email or even shudder Facebook has helped me stay in touch with people. Monica bills itself as a "Personal Relationship Manager" and if you're familiar with the CRM acronym (Customer Relationship Manager) in the context of running a business, you can start to see where this could be useful. In Monica, you can add family, friends, and others you meet in your walks in life along with any information you have on them. Monica will remind you when birthdays are coming up or other important events. If you saved gift ideas for them it would have those. You can see relationship connections to know who is married to whom. If you were really masochistic you could log all your interactions with all of these people there (spoiler alert: I won't be doing anything quite that crazy).

Best of all Monica is open source so I was able to install it on my own domain and start playing with it. All the data is private to me and not shared with any other social media platforms. Like any relationship manager, you likely get out of it what you put in so I will have to regularly add information to find real use there. But even if it's nothing more than birthdays that could be useful to someone like me. I hope to see more integrations to take advantages of the platforms like Facebook that already have a lot of information to avoid all the tedious data entry and perhaps better notification options beyond getting emails. But the core idea that I have space on my domain where I can keep track of the relationships in my life is interesting to me and gets at the heart of what I think it means to have a domain of your own. It's not all WordPress blogs out there.