This is the third entry in a series on my Notion architecture for various life management systems. To see the full series, please visit the home page, Productivity In Notion

One of the first things that I wanted to build in Notion was a personal CRM system. I'm not the first to do this in Notion, but I do have some handy customization that make it highly actionable.

**CRM** - a Customer Relationship Manager. 
Common in business, it enables businesses to keep up-to-date with their clients.
For personal use, it's a way to make sure you stay in touch with your friends, family, and network.

First, the basics of the CRM: we use a single database that houses each of my contacts. This contains some of the usual fields, name, contact info, city, et cetera.

Important Features

Besides those, there are a few fields that govern the main interactions that actively prompt me to reach out to people at the right time:

• Bucket - this is either "Family", "Friend", or "Network" and classifies the broad section of my life this person is in. Thus, if I visit my "Friends" project, it filters my contact database to just contacts in that bucket.
• Level - the level of the relationship. This operates on a code that I won't relay in detail, but ranges from "V+" which would include my fiancée and goes all the way down to "P" which, well, includes people I don't really have any desire to see again. It's harsh but true and feels slightly more satisfying than simply deleting their entry.

You could figure out this code with some creativity, but it is not important.

• Birthday - perhaps obviously, this keeps the person's birthday, which for many people is a great reason to reach out!
• Last Contact Date - the date at which I last was in touch with each person. This could get tedious, but I keep as a loose estimate as well which is fine.

So this data is great, but we need a couple computed columns to make it useful! So we have two fields that calculate based off these inputs:

• Next Birthday - easy enough, this takes the actual birthdate and calculates the next day that'll happen. E.g. if your birthday is April 1st, then it will show 4/1/2021 until that day comes at which point it'll switch over to 4/1/2022.
• Status - this is the magic that converts the last contact date, and level into a binary status of "good" or "time to catch up." The formula for this looks complex, but it basically translates a level into a desired catch-up frequency. If that is say, six months, it will prompt me to catch up if [today] - [last catchup] is greater than six months.