I Built a Personal CRM on Notion (template included)!

About this video

Jeff Su walks through a personal CRM template he built on Notion and says he has maintained for the past six months, arguing a personal relationship management system helps you remember important details about friends, family, and professional contacts so you do not lose touch. A good system, he says, must remind you to keep in contact and be easy to update. The template’s snapshot view shows six basic columns — name, relationship, birthday, industry, location, and VIP status — while only VIPs, usually five or fewer at a time, get extra properties and individual pages, which reduces friction. For everyone he records birthdays, capturing them in Todoist, entering the next occurrence with a day-of reminder in Notion, and adding a recurring annual event in Google Calendar because Notion does not have a recurring date feature. Relationship tags are not mutually exclusive, and he chose industry over company because people change companies every two to three years but rarely change industry. VIP tracking adds last contacted date, a status formula borrowed from the Notion team’s CRM template that returns ‘hit them up’ if more than three months have passed, a one-sentence last update, and a page with background, contact information, and notes. He maintains it as-needed — adding birthdays immediately and spending five minutes after meetings jotting highlights — plus 30 minutes every two weeks reviewing messages and scheduling catch-ups.

Key takeaways

Keep the base CRM simple with name, relationship, birthday, industry, location, and VIP status for all contacts
Limit VIPs to five or fewer and only add deeper tracking for them to keep the system maintainable
Record birthdays in both Notion and a recurring Google Calendar event because Notion lacks recurring dates
Use the VIP status formula that flags contacts not reached in more than three months with ‘hit them up’
Do scheduled maintenance of 30 minutes every two weeks, plus immediate five-minute notes after meetings and calls

Episode details: published September 14, 2021 · 8:39 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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