Steven Jonas

January 19, 2015

I’m fascinated by self-tracking projects that focus on things that are hard to quantify.

Such is the case here. Fabio Ricardo dos Santos is gregarious and likes to be around people. A lot of people. But he had a nagging sense that something was out of balance.

To better understand why, he began to track his relationships and interactions. He soon found that out of the people that he knows, only about 14% are what he considered to be important relationships and that they made up 34% of his interactions. He felt that this number was too low and it spurred him to spend more time with that important 14%.

But he didn’t just track his time with people and the number of interactions. He expanded his system to include the quality of his relationships and interactions. He found that this made him focus on face-to-face interactions and video chats over emails and texts.

The other side of this, though, is that when you have a system where you rate and rank your relationships, how does it not seem like you are rating people? What are the implications of doing so?