Like many gangly teenagers, I spent part of high school feeling extremely out of place. I was nerdy, awkward, and my social skills hadn’t quite kicked in yet. 

So I started taking notes. It approximated an anthropologists field notes, with a list of people whom I enjoyed hanging out with, some observations about social dynamics, the types of activities people enjoyed, and thoughts on how to be a better friend. As I look back on them, the cutest finding includes some potential dates for my first girlfriend, many of which happened; Edmontons Muttart Conservatory, the local blues java cafe, transcend coffee.

These notes changes and iterated as I broke out of my shell and transformed towards being the extrovert I am today. I found a list of who I thought would be good in dinner parties together (many thanks for my parents making it easy for me to host those, and our large table), and just a list of names of people I could contact when feeling lonely.

What these notes lacked, however, was organization. What worked for a small high school friend group became increasingly unwieldy as my social circle grew, especially with the mass of new people I met in England. The England list also had to carry more weight than the others, as I included cues for the names of all the people I met.

I’m not great with names, my one weakness as a swim instructor. My few tricks included a little waterproof divers whiteboard where I could have the names written down for day one. Which worked well when I taught 5-12 people a lesson before promptly forgetting them after the session is done. I tried translating this practice to England but the sheer quantity of new people I was meeting made my “England friends list” near unusable. It contained almost everyone I thought I’d meet again, with name, basic details, and a memory cue, ending up with around 60 names alone plus auxiliary notes.

I won’t try to stay in touch with all these people, but with the precious few I want to hold on, even as they scatter around the world. Which means more than just viewing stories on instagram. Nor would just remembering to reach out work; the first semester in the UK I didn’t even properly keep in touch with my parents. Updating many of my friends in Edmonton also fell by the wayside.

So obviously, I need a system.

Add in a desire to refresh my excel (as I hardly touched it since an interview exams last year) the friendsheet was born!

It contains the following features:

1. Rows of Friends with columns of names and personal details.
2. Highlighted name if it’s been longer than a designated tempo since I’ve last contacted them. Tempo’s can be set as a group to allow for increasing or decreasing the rate of all communication during busy or quiet periods in my life.
3. Macro’s which autofill the correct date for “today, now, tomorrow, yesterday, last week, last month, next week” in date columns.
4. Ability to sort by those I’m in the same city with.

A few of my friends love the idea of this sheet and I promised I’d send a copy. This should be a download link to it, including an example pre-filled with a couple economists.

It’s a .xlsm file with macro’s. Your computer should flag it when it’s opened, just say yes to macro’s or bypass the security to enable functionality (if you trust me. Don’t run any spreadsheets from people you don’t trust).

This was my first time attempting to code inside an excel sheet. At this point I pretty much agree with Microsoft’s help file that argues this type of thing should be a last resort. Coding inside a spreadsheet is incredibly clunky, I had some esoteric bugs that would have been a real pain to fix without Claude. And Claude couldn’t even find the bugs, it just “streamlined” my code and things magically worked.

Hopefully, this sheet will help me stay in contact with people through the years, and maybe it will help you too (if you are also the nerdy type who makes spreadsheets for kicks).

Cheers,

Kent