ProdPod: Episode 53 – “Pull Method” for More Productive Relationships, Part One

The human mind can keep approximately 150 social connections in their conscious mind at any given time. This median average comes from Dunbar’s number named after the British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, who theorized the oft-cited social metric. I have thousands of people that think they “know” me because they’ve connected with me in some light touchpoint manner at countless business and social events, hundreds of seminars and presentations I’ve spoken at, email messages and via Social Media. I’m truly blessed to be able to communicate with some really great people in my professional and personal lives all over the world, and I honor and appreciate every communication I have in my life. However, these online platforms create sometimes a false perception of relationship and genuine community and I want to make sure I’m fostering healthy, productive relationships with the people I truly care about and want to get to know better. So for several years, I’ve developed a technique to keep myself from being overwhelmed by the overconnectedness of social networking services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
I call this technique, the “Pull Method.” Here are the basics:
1. First, make an accounting of the people you care about. On a piece of paper with pen (that is, without any address books or electronic aids), wrote down everyone important in your life today; broadly, the categories are family, social and professional connections. Number them.  If there are more than 200 contacts, you should likely review the list to *really * consider whether you care about these people or that you just remembered them. Note, this isn’t a memory challenge but a practice in determining about whom you really care. Once you’ve done that, you can move on to the next two phases.
In the next episode, I’ll cover phases two and three of my “Pull Method” for more productive relationship. Stay tuned!