The reminder that knows when to keep quiet
Every contact app I have used has the same idea of a reminder. You tell it to nag you about someone every month, and it does. Every month. Whatever else is going on.
So on a Monday it tells me to get in touch with a client I am having lunch with on Wednesday. I already know. I booked the lunch. The reminder is not wrong, exactly. It is just not paying attention.
Do that a dozen times and you stop reading the reminders. Then they are worse than nothing, because now you have a list you ignore and a feeling you are on top of things.
One list, first thing
NexxusCRM opens on a page it calls the Morning Digest. Four numbers across the top: meetings today, followups due today, emails still waiting on a reply, and people going cold. Underneath, one list for today, and a column of the relationships drifting in either direction.
That screenshot is from a demo profile, so nobody real is being neglected. But you can read it at a glance. Three things to do today. Fiona is overdue. Richard Ashworth is on a quarterly cadence and it has been 71 days, which is why he is at the top of going cold and not yet a task.
That is the whole page. It is built when you open it, from what the app already knows. There is no feed to scroll and nothing to clear before you can start work.
A cadence per person
The list is only as good as what feeds it, and what feeds it is a cadence. Each contact can have one: weekly, fortnightly (the app says biweekly; I am working on it), monthly, quarterly or yearly.
Most people have none, and that is the point. The tooltip on the setting says it plainly: "Setting one is how you say this person matters." Two hundred contacts on a monthly cadence is a second inbox. Twenty, chosen on purpose, is a practice.
The clock runs from the last time you were actually in touch, not from when you set it. An email counts. So does a meeting. When the time is up, a task appears: "Follow up with Priya". Do the thing, log it, and the clock starts again.
The bit I have not seen anywhere else
Before the app creates that task, it checks your calendar. If there is a meeting with that person starting in the next seven days, it does not create the reminder at all.
Not snoozed. Not hidden in a folder. Just not there, because there is nothing to remind you of. You are already seeing them.
Then the meeting happens, and it counts as contact. The clock resets from the day you met, and the next reminder is a full cadence away. If the meeting gets cancelled, the reminder comes back within half an hour. The calendar was covering for it, and now it is not.
The matching is done on attendee email. If Priya's address is on the invite and Priya's address is on her contact, the app knows it is her. Your own address is ignored, so a meeting with yourself does not count as networking (I checked).
Where the calendar goes
Your calendar is fetched straight from iCloud to your Mac (Google Calendar is not in the beta yet), read only, and kept in the same encrypted database as everything else. There is no NexxusCRM server in the middle. The app could not send your diary anywhere if it wanted to, and it does not want to.
That matters more for a calendar than people think. A diary is a fairly precise record of who you are talking to, when, and how often. It is the network, written down. It should be on your machine.
Why bother
None of this is clever. It is a seven day window and a date comparison. But it is the difference between a reminder you trust and one you swipe away, and a reminder you swipe away is a reminder you have paid for and do not have.
I wanted a list I could believe first thing in the morning. If something is on it, it needs doing. If it is not on it, either it does not need doing yet or it is already in the diary.
If you want a list you can believe
The first fifty people get it in October. They shape what gets built next, and whatever it costs at launch, they never pay more than that.
If your followups live in your head, or in a recurring reminder you stopped reading in March, ask for a seat.