One place. One list. One path back to them.
You've made contact. Now here's where you put it so it doesn't get lost again.
What this is: A practical guide for independent consultants ready to bring their scattered contacts into one simple, ownable list.
Who it’s for: Consultants who have started reaching out but have no central place to track who they’ve contacted, what was said, and what comes next.
What you’ll take away: A simple contact tracking habit, a template to make it stick, and a Notion template to get you started today.
The problem was never that you didn’t know enough people. It was that you had nowhere to put them.
You’ve done the hard part.
You picked up the phone. You scrolled through your contacts. You thought about someone you haven’t spoken to in a while and you actually reached out. That took more courage than most people give it credit for.
But here’s what happens next, if you’re not careful.
They reply. You have a lovely exchange. Life carries on. And three weeks later you can’t remember who you contacted, what you said, or whether they ever got back to you. The moment passes. The relationship stays warm in theory and goes cold in practice.
Not because you didn’t care. Because you had nowhere to put it.
The list isn’t a database. It’s a memory.
I’m not going to tell you to build a CRM. I’m not going to suggest a seventeen-column spreadsheet or a complicated tagging system or a piece of software with a monthly subscription.
What I’m going to suggest is simpler than all of that.
A list. Somewhere you own it. Somewhere you’ll actually look at it.
That might be a note on your phone. A page in your notebook. A simple doc. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. What matters is that it exists, and that every time you reach out to someone or hear back from them, you write it down.
Who you contacted. When. What you said. What came back. And one more thing: what kind of relationship this is.
Because not everyone on your list is the same. Some people were always going to be a single project, a brief exchange, a specific moment in time. Some are deeply relevant to where you both are right now. And some are the kind of people you’ll keep coming back to for years, and they’ll keep coming back to you.
Knowing which is which changes everything about what you do next.
Below, I’m giving you the exact template I use to track contacts, the three relationship types to assign to every name on your list, the status markers that tell you how warm each relationship is right now, and a free Notion template to get you started today.